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Meta Agrees To Change Advertising Technology In Agreement With USA


SAN FRANCISCO — Meta agreed on Tuesday to replace its ad technology and pay a $115,054 penalty in a settlement with the Justice Department over allegations that the company’s ad systems are possessed. Discrimination against Facebook users with restrict who can see housing listings on the platform by their race, gender and zip code.

Under the deal, the company Meta, formerly known as Facebook, He said he would change his technology. and use a new computer-assisted method that aims to regularly check whether target audiences who qualify for residential ads actually see those ads. The new method, called a “variance reduction system,” relies on machine learning to enable advertisers to serve housing-related ads to specific classes of protected people.

“We’ll occasionally take a snapshot of marketers’ target audiences, see who they’re targeting, and remove as much variation as possible from that audience,” said Roy L. Austin, Meta’s vice president and general counsel for civil rights. , he said in an interview. He described it as “a significant technological breakthrough in how machine learning is used to deliver personalized ads.”

Facebook, which has become a business giant by collecting its users’ data and allowing advertisers to target ads based on the characteristics of the target audience, has faced complaints for years that some of these practices are biased and discriminatory. The company’s ad systems allowed marketers to choose who sees their ads using thousands of different attributes, which also allowed advertisers to exclude people who fell into a number of protected categories.

While Tuesday’s deal relates to housing ads, Meta said it plans to implement its new system to control the targeting of employment and credit-related ads. The company has faced backlash before. allow prejudice against women in job postings and the exclusion of certain groups of people see credit card ads.

“Because of this groundbreaking lawsuit, Meta will – for the first time – change its ad delivery system to address algorithmic discrimination,” said US attorney Damian Williams. said in a statement. “But if Meta fails to show that it has sufficiently modified its distribution system to protect against algorithmic bias, this office will continue the lawsuit.”

Meta also said it will no longer use a feature called “custom ad audiences,” a tool it has developed to help advertisers expand the groups of people their ads will reach. The Ministry of Justice said the vehicle also engages in discriminatory practices. The company said the tool is an early effort to combat bias, and its new methods will be more effective.

The issue of biased ad targeting is especially discussed in residential ads. In 2018, Ben Carson, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a formal complaint Against Facebook, he accused the company of having ad systems that “illegally discriminate” based on categories such as race, religion and disability. Facebook’s potential for ad discrimination was also revealed in 2016 investigation ProPublica demonstrated that the company’s technology makes it easier for marketers to exclude certain ethnic groups for advertising purposes.

in 2019 HUD sues Facebook to discriminate against housing and violate the Fair Housing Act. The agency said Facebook systems don’t deliver ads to a “diverse audience” even if an advertiser wants the ad to be seen widely.

“Facebook discriminates against people based on who they are and where they live,” Mr Carson said at the time. “Using a computer to limit a person’s housing choices can be as discriminatory as slamming the door in someone’s face.”

The HUD lawsuit came amid broader crackdown from civil rights groups who argue that the vast and complex advertising systems that underpin some of the biggest internet platforms have inherent biases and that tech companies like Meta, Google and others should do more. undo these prejudices.

The field of study known as “algorithmic justice” has been a topic of significant interest among computer scientists in the field of artificial intelligence. Leading researchers, including former Google scientists such as Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, rang the alarm bell on such prejudices for years.

Since that time, Facebook is down about the types of categories marketers can choose when purchasing residential ads, reducing the number to hundreds and eliminating targeting options by race, age, and zip code.

Meta’s new system, which is still in development, will occasionally check to whom ads for housing, employment, and credit are served, ensuring that those audiences are matched with the people marketers want to target. For example, if the ads served began to lean towards white men in their 20s, the new system would theoretically recognize this and change the ads to be served more fairly among a wider and more diverse audience.

Meta said it will work with HUD in the coming months to incorporate the technology into Meta’s ad targeting systems, and acknowledged third-party auditing of the new system’s effectiveness.

The Justice Department said the penalty Meta paid in the deal was the maximum available under the Fair Housing Act.



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