Teen's Overdose Reportedly Linked to Meta's AI Systems Failing to Block Ads for Illegal Drugs

September 11, 2023

Meta's AI systems allegedly failed to prevent the dissemination of ads for illegal drugs on Facebook and Instagram, potentially leading to a 15-year-old's overdose death. This incident underscores the need for robust AI governance to ensure safe and secure AI practices.

JOIN US in shaping Project Cerebellum's Harm Prevention efforts through the HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Govern) initiative to enforce guardrails for AI and prevent similar incidents.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.692, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.670, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MANAGE 4.3 — similarity 0.656, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: meta-platforms, instagram, facebook
Alleged developer: meta-platforms
Alleged harmed parties: instagram-users, facebook-users, elijah-ott

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/758

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.