Incident 220: Facebook Mistakenly Blocked Small Business Ads

Description: Facebook’s AI mistakenly blocked advertisements by small and struggling businesses, after the company allegedly leaned more on algorithms to monitor ads on the platform with little review from human moderators.

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Alleged: Facebook developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed small businesses on Facebook.

Incident Stats

Incident ID

220

Report Count

Incident Date

2020-11-11

Editors

Khoa Lam

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Facebook's AI-fueled attempt to block bad ads is hurting legitimate small business owners — and its 'pay-to-play' customer support is leaving them stranded ahead of the holiday shopping season

businessinsider.com

Facebook's AI mistakenly bans ads for struggling businesses

post-gazette.com

Facebook’s AI mistakenly blocks ads of struggling businesses; tech giant issues apology

republicworld.com

Facebook’s AI is mistakenly banning some small business’ ads

fortune.com

In mid-March, even as it encouraged its full-time employees to work remotely, Facebook's largely contract-based content moderators were still required to be in the office. Amid public pressure, Facebook eventually sent them home as well, sa…

New York-based businesswoman Ruth Harrigan usually sells her honey and beeswax products in souvenir shops. But with COVID-19 pausing tourism, she’s been almost entirely dependent on Facebook ads to drive online sales.

On Nov. 11, this new f…

Facebook Inc. recently issued a statement apologizing to small businesses for mistakenly blocking their ads. In a bid to curb ‘infodemics’ or misinformation and keep a check on policy violators, the company has appointed Artificial Intellig…

New York-based businesswoman Ruth Harrigan usually sells her honey and beeswax products in souvenir shops. But with Covid-19 pausing tourism, she’s been almost entirely dependent on Facebook ads to drive online sales. On Nov. 11, this new f…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.