Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the House Financial Services Committee to answer questions from lawmakers about his company’s plan for cryptocurrency, whether Facebook is violating trust issues and the norms for political advertisement.
The bigger question during the interrogation was: Does Facebook’s system for advertisement discriminates between gender and race? The testimony was of 5 hours and the result seemed to be yes. Alan Mislove, an associate professor at Northeastern University who researches on online networks, is currently studying Facebook’s ad-delivery program and found some critical issues. He found Facebook does show ads on the basis of gender and racial lines that is a total violation of federal laws that prevent discrimination. In his research along with his colleagues, he tested many advertisements to give authenticity for his results. As the researchers tweaked the images, they found the system presented ads according to gender and racial lines.
Although advertisers don’t intentionally target only one group or gender as it was a problematic feature that was eliminated in summers, rather it was an algorithmic problem that made advertisement choices based on discriminatory stereotypes. This information was offered by Mislove before the members of Congress during Mark Zuckerberg’s hearing, while US representative, Maxime Waters made a statement on an ad-delivery algorithm, “Facebook’s ads were found to have a discriminatory impact when advertisers did not target their audience in discriminatory ways.”
Besides all these allegations, the algorithms of Facebook were coded in a very confidential manner. Still, Alan and other researchers were able to observe that when someone buys an ad on Facebook, they decide whom they want to show it to. According to Facebook, advertisers target and focus on a particular audience based on certain parameters: demography, interests, behaviour, and more. If you are a bookseller then you want students or book readers to see your ad or if you are a pharmacist then you want clinics or patients to see your ads. Another thing that was troubling them was that the advertisers pay a bid on you. The advertiser who has the highest bid will show you the ad. Meanwhile, they also found that Facebook also estimates which advertising is relevant for the user and which is not. Alan Mislove says, “Facebook wants to try to show you ads that it thinks will be relevant to you, but we don’t know how it(the company) calculates relevance.”
The discrimination in ads which are based on housing, credit, and employment opportunities are illegal in democracy. Mislove and other researchers are worried as they can’t see any robust steps taken by Facebook CEO to resolve this crucial issue.
Shweta Tripathi
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