Incident 318: Facebook Recommended Military Gear Ads Despite Pause on Weapons Accessories Ads
Description: Facebook’s algorithmic recommendations reportedly continued showing advertisements for gun accessories and military gear, despite Facebook’s halt on weapons accessories ads following the US Capitol attack.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Facebook developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Facebook users.
Incident Stats
Incident ID
318
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2021-01-13
Editors
Khoa Lam
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
In a statement that did not address BuzzFeed News’ questions about specific ads, pages, or groups, Facebook spokesperson Liz Bourgeois said, “Our teams are working to stay ahead of any militia groups that try to evade” the social network’s …
Facebook suspended President Trump and announced other actions after the U.S. Capitol riot. But it continued to push ads for military gear next to insurrection posts.
Facebook has been serving up ads for weapons accessories and body armor a…
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.