After having fostered its new partnership with the Department of Justice for over a year now, Meta has just released the first stage of live deployment of its new Variance Reduction System (VRS) for housing ads. The system was designed to reduce bias and increase the equitable distribution of ads across Meta’s apps. Check out this overview for a bit of extra detail. Meta’s VRS measures the actual audience reach for each ad and ensures a broader spread of exposure, based on various audience factors. 

As per Meta: 

“The VRS uses new machine learning technology in ad delivery so that the actual audience that sees an ad more closely reflects the eligible target audience for that ad. After the ad has been shown to a large enough group of people, the VRS measures aggregate demographic distribution of those who have seen the ad to understand how that audience compares with the demographic distribution of the eligible target audience selected by the advertiser.”

House of Ads

In essence, the system ensures that housing ads are not being limited to certain ethnic or socioeconomic groups by Meta’s ad targeting AI process, by measuring the overall ad exposure, then matching that data against audience data based on US Census statistics on race and ethnicity. 

The system is the latest in Meta’s efforts to address regulatory concerns about its ad targeting tools, and the potential for exclusion based on the thousands of targeting factors available in the app. In the past, Meta has already come under heavy fire for its variable ad targeting measures. 

Back in 2017, an investigation by ProPublica found that advertisers were able to create Facebook ads that excluded people based on sensitive factors – restrictions that are prohibited by federal law in housing and employment. If you double-back to Meta’s video overview above, Meta removed various ad targeting options for housing, employment, and credit in 2019. This new VRS process is the next stage in Meta’s ongoing work on this front. While Meta’s ad targeting systems, overall, have been impacted by changes to data collection and tracking, new measures like these will provide more assurance that its ads aren’t facilitating indirect profiling of certain groups by broadening exposure to all audience segments. 

Ensuring AI fairness is anything but simple, especially when you consider that the majority of inputs used to power AI models often already include implicit bias to some degree. Every platform is working to mitigate this and build new weightings to filter out unconscious and unintended impacts. It’ll take time to measure the cause and effect of each update, and Meta’s now monitoring the first stage of this roll-out, and the various elements it’s working to balance.

The Wrap

Meta says that the initial stage of the VRS rollout will focus on housing ads in the US, with credit and employment ads to follow. With more regulations slated to come in this year, Meta is off to a good start when it comes to securing favor on the regulatory side, which should help it further its plans, at least on some fronts, towards getting close to a full-fledged Metaverse. 

Sources

https://bit.ly/3GUhd9J