AI incident #522 ·
Facebook Political Ad Delivery Algorithms Inferred Users' Political Alignment, Inhibiting Political Campaigns' Reach
What happened
Facebook's political ad delivery system reportedly differentiated the price of user reach based on their inferred political alignment, inhibiting political campaigns' ability to reach voters with diverse political views, which allegedly reinforces political polarization and creates informational filter bubbles.
Only the incident metadata is stored here. The underlying news reports are on the AI Incident Database (CC BY-SA 4.0); use the links above to read them.
News reports (1)
Coverage catalogued by the AI Incident Database. Titles link to the original publisher; the text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
- Risk domain
- Misinformation
- Causal entity
- AI
- Intent
- Unintentional
- Timing
- Post-deployment
- Harm level
- —
- Sectors
- —
- Countries
- —
Risk entries describing this failure mode
Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 3.2.
- Information degradation
"Information degradation - Creation or spread of false, hallucinatory, low-quality, misleading, or inaccurate information that degrades the information ecosystem and causes people to develop false or inaccurate perceptio...
- Radicalisation
"Radicalisation - Adoption of extreme political, social, or religious ideals and aspirations due to the nature or misuse of an algorithmic system, potentially resulting in abuse, violence, or terrorism."
- Institutional trust loss
"Institutional trust loss - Erosion of trust in public institutions and weakened checks and balances due to mis/disinformation, influence operations, over-dependence on technology, etc."
- Worsened epistemic processes for society
"Epistemic processes and problem solving: we currently see more reasons to be concerned about AI worsening society's epistemic processes than reasons to be optimistic about AI helping us better solve problems as a societ...
- Reduced decision-making capacity as a result of decreased trust in information
"In addition, the increased awareness of these trends in information production and distribution could make it harder for anyone to evaluate the trustworthiness of any information source, reducing overall trust in inform...
- Widespread use of persuasive tools contributes to splintered epistemic communities
"Even without deliberate misuse, widespread use of powerful persuasion tools could have negative impacts. If such tools were used by many different groups to advance many different ideas, we could see the world splinteri...
- AI contributes to increased online polarisation
"One of the most significant commercial uses of current AI systems is in the content recommendation algorithms of social media companies, and there are already concerns that this is contributing to worsened polarisation...
- Degradation of the information environment
"Frontier AI can cheaply generate realistic content which can falsely portray people and events. There is potential risk of compromised decision-making by individuals and institutions who rely on inaccurate or misleading...
Incidents in the same risk subdomain
- Google Books Appears to Be Indexing Works Written by AI
- Uptick in Low-Quality AI-Produced Content Degraded Publishers' Submission Management
- Korean Politician Employed Deepfake as Campaign Representative
Other incidents involving Facebook
- Facebook's Automated Moderation Allowed Ads Threatening Election Workers to be Posted
- Facebook AI-Supported Moderation for Ads Failed to Detect Violating Content
- Facebook’s Hate Speech Detection Algorithms Allegedly Disproportionately Failed to Remove Racist Content towards Minority Groups
- Facebook Internally Reported Failure of Ranking Algorithm, Exposing Harmful Content to Viewers over Months
- Facebook's Automated Moderation Flagged Gardening Group's Language Use by Mistake
- Facebook's Automated Tools Failed to Adequately Remove Hate Speech, Violence, and Incitement