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Facebook Ads Can Still Discriminate, Despite a Civil Rights Settlement

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Re: Facebook Ads Can Still Discriminate, Despite a Civil Rights Settlement

#21

Post by AnthonyMouse »

strbean wrote: post #15
unlinked_dll wrote: post #2

* housing, employment, and credit Ads I think the easiest solution would be to disallow ads of those categories on their platform. I'd think the risk of "facebook/instagram is racist" damaging their brand and the cost of federal discrimination lawsuits would outweigh whatever revenue they project. As an aside, I know it's faux pas to bring up any observed (and/or presumed) differences between the protected classes -…

Your aside is pretty much dead-on the big ethical issue with bias in ML right now. For example, ML can do quite a good job of predicting recidivism rates in convicts, and justice systems have been using this to aid in sentencing and parole hearings. Obviously, these ML approaches are not supposed to consider ethnicity. So the factor that ends up having the greatest weight is "did your father / grandfather spend time…

The real problem is that there is an actual racial disparity in recidivism rates, so an algorithm that makes accurate predictions will predict the racial disparity that actually exists. There is no way to solve that without significantly impairing the accuracy of the predictions -- which is to say releasing convicts who we know have an unreasonably high probability of recidivism merely because there were too many other convicts with an unreasonably high probability of recidivism who were the same race.

You can also imagine what happens if you apply this recidivism "adjustment" to gender, which causes a lot of the people advocating it in the case of race to become nervous and defensive.

Re: Facebook Ads Can Still Discriminate, Despite a Civil Rights Settlement

#22

Post by bduerst »

Koremat6666 wrote: post #13

Targeted ads by definition are discriminatory. In fact the best ads are the ones that discriminate perfectly based on wishes of the advertiser.

The perfect ad is one that gives the consumer exactly what they want from the supplier. Ads solve the asymmetric information problem on imperfect markets, which require information to be efficient.

Re: Facebook Ads Can Still Discriminate, Despite a Civil Rights Settlement

#23

Post by _8j50 »

blackoil wrote: post #14
_8j50 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, incorrect bias can happen only if either the input or process is bad. So, if you consider the output undesirable then there is a problem with input or process. Ideally, ads would not be targeted at all in any way and micro targeting should be a crime (for privacy reasons as well). Short if that, you target people because of their proven individual preferences and tendencies as opposed to using their me…

This would entail no magazine/blog should also be targeting to a social group. i.e. no men's or women's magazine

What a silly argument, the magazine is not the advertiser. It's fine for content to target groups but not ads! You can have a men's magazine and the ads on there can target men, you can't have a men's magazine that sends out prints with ads targeting specific subsets of men. Content targeting is fine, user targeting is not.

Re: Facebook Ads Can Still Discriminate, Despite a Civil Rights Settlement

#24

Post by philwelch »

munk-a wrote: post #7
whiddershins wrote: post #6

I can’t understand, in succinct plain terms, what the desired outcome is here. What would it look like if the ads were not biased, or discriminating, in any bad way.

Maybe it'd just look like it looked in the 90's, there wouldn't be targeted advertising and everyone except the marketers would be happier.

There was targeted advertising in the 90’s. A lot of it uses direct mail, and profiled consumers based upon their magazine subscriptions. But other things like grocery store loyalty cards and the like were used back then, too. Television, radio, and print advertising was and is targeted by demographic.

Re: Facebook Ads Can Still Discriminate, Despite a Civil Rights Settlement

#25

Post by ng12 »

philwelch wrote: post #24
munk-a wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it'd just look like it looked in the 90's, there wouldn't be targeted advertising and everyone except the marketers would be happier.

There was targeted advertising in the 90’s. A lot of it uses direct mail, and profiled consumers based upon their magazine subscriptions. But other things like grocery store loyalty cards and the like were used back then, too. Television, radio, and print advertising was and is targeted by demographic.

Literally the entire purpose of the magazine industry is targeted advertising. The only reason to publish something like Cosmo or Hustler is to sell adds targeting the types of people who read Cosmo or Hustler.

Re: Facebook Ads Can Still Discriminate, Despite a Civil Rights Settlement

#26

Post by edmundsauto »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #21
strbean wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your aside is pretty much dead-on the big ethical issue with bias in ML right now. For example, ML can do quite a good job of predicting recidivism rates in convicts, and justice systems have been using this to aid in sentencing and parole hearings. Obviously, these ML approaches are not supposed to consider ethnicity. So the factor that ends up having the greatest weight is "did your father / grandfather spend time…

The real problem is that there is an actual racial disparity in recidivism rates, so an algorithm that makes accurate predictions will predict the racial disparity that actually exists. There is no way to solve that without significantly impairing the accuracy of the predictions -- which is to say releasing convicts who we know have an unreasonably high probability of recidivism merely because there were too many oth…

Accuracy is not the top objective in these systems, fairness is.

Re: Facebook Ads Can Still Discriminate, Despite a Civil Rights Settlement

#27

Post by [deleted] »

theartfuldodger wrote: post #12
sp332 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For stuff like "employment, housing and credit", it's illegal to discriminate in advertising. That's why they made a whole new portal to try to avoid discrimination for those kinds of ads. So after a while if you gather data and realize that your algorithm is sexist and ageist, then continuing to use that algorithm to place ads is knowingly using sexist and ageist techniques in advertising. I think the EEOC has the a…

Those regulatory concerns should fall onto the purchasers list of responsibilities. The EEOC has the authority to censure the parties misusing their advertising options. For example as a marketer who does work in all of the above industries , technology should not limit my use of my dollar. If i have 10,000 for an apartment campaign, i should be able to spend 5k on ads showcasing my apartment gym focused on men and 5…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook Ads Can Still Discriminate, Despite a Civil Rights Settlement

#28

Post by sapski »

theartfuldodger wrote: post #12
sp332 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For stuff like "employment, housing and credit", it's illegal to discriminate in advertising. That's why they made a whole new portal to try to avoid discrimination for those kinds of ads. So after a while if you gather data and realize that your algorithm is sexist and ageist, then continuing to use that algorithm to place ads is knowingly using sexist and ageist techniques in advertising. I think the EEOC has the a…

Those regulatory concerns should fall onto the purchasers list of responsibilities. The EEOC has the authority to censure the parties misusing their advertising options. For example as a marketer who does work in all of the above industries , technology should not limit my use of my dollar. If i have 10,000 for an apartment campaign, i should be able to spend 5k on ads showcasing my apartment gym focused on men and 5…

Author of the underlying study here.

Facebook has been insisting that non-discrimination should be the responsibility of the purchasers, but we've shown over [0] and over [1] again [2] that even when the advertiser targets all groups proportionally (no misuse of advertising options), Facebook subselects who to show their ads to in a skewed way, leaving the advertiser and the users no recourse.

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.02095.pdf

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.04255.pdf

[2] https://sapiezynski.com/papers/sapiezynski2019algorithms.pdf

Re: Facebook Ads Can Still Discriminate, Despite a Civil Rights Settlement

#29

Post by s1artibartfast »

edmundsauto wrote: post #26
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem is that there is an actual racial disparity in recidivism rates, so an algorithm that makes accurate predictions will predict the racial disparity that actually exists. There is no way to solve that without significantly impairing the accuracy of the predictions -- which is to say releasing convicts who we know have an unreasonably high probability of recidivism merely because there were too many oth…

Accuracy is not the top objective in these systems, fairness is.

In this example, what is fairness, if not the most accurate prediction possible?

Re: Facebook Ads Can Still Discriminate, Despite a Civil Rights Settlement

#30

Post by AnthonyMouse »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #29
edmundsauto wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accuracy is not the top objective in these systems, fairness is.

In this example, what is fairness, if not the most accurate prediction possible?

Especially when you consider fairness to the community at large. Is it fair to black neighborhoods if we send proportionally more expected recidivist drug dealers and rapists back into their communities than we do to white communities?
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