With the advancement of communication and telecommunications, world citizens are experiencing a shift of communication habits. Facebook has been a major part of this change by connecting millions of people around the world, making it one of the most popularly used social networking sites. Recently, a team of researchers from the Northeastern University tested the advertising system used by Facebook with a series of online advertisements, where it was found that Facebook’s system presented the ads more predominantly to specific racial and gender groups.
Alan Mislove, an associate dean, director, and associate professor at the Northeastern University and the lead researcher said, “I was surprised at the strength of the results in terms of how strong you see the skew in particular circumstances. I did not imagine that we would be able to run ads that are exactly the same, except for the image. And that, depending on the image we chose, one would go 90 percent to men, one would go 90 percent to women—that you would see that strong of a skew”.
According to Mislove, our lives are being mediated by large online algorithm-based platforms. In many domains, if we are okay with advertisement on shoes for women, it is assumed that we are okay with any advertisement related to women. But there are other domains where the controlling of the flow of information could lead to negative outcomes for the society. The most obvious of those are credit, housing, and employment which, in addition to being very important domains, also have special legal protection.
The researchers created harmless, carefully controlled suites of ads which were linked to real job and housing services. While they couldn’t know exactly why the algorithm decided to deliver the ads to particular users, the researchers were able to see aggregate statistics about the gender and location to whom the ad was visible. And by focusing the ads, which provides public access to voter records, it was possible to use the statistics to infer the racial distribution as well.
According to Mislove, “All advertising is based on auctions all over the web, and I don’t know how you fix that without just saying we don’t have those kinds of ads. So that is very much an open problem.”
Shahjadi Jemim Rahman
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