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Fwd: Facebook’s Ad Algorithm Is a Race and Gender Stereotyping Machine, New Study Suggests
by Alberto Cammozzo April 5, 2019

April 5, 2019

<https://theintercept.com/2019/04/03/facebook-ad-algorithm-race-gender/> Facebook’s Ad Algorithm Is a Race and Gender Stereotyping Machine, New Study Suggests _How exactly Facebook_ decides who sees what is one of the great pieces of forbidden knowledge in the information age, hidden away behind nondisclosure agreements, trade secrecy law, and a general culture of opacity. New research <https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.02095> from experts at Northeastern University, the University of Southern California, and the public-interest advocacy group Upturn doesn’t reveal how Facebook’s targeting algorithms work, but does show an alarming outcome: They appear to deliver certain ads, including for housing and employment, in a way that aligns with race and gender stereotypes — even when advertisers ask for the ads to be exposed a broad, inclusive audience. There are two basic steps to advertising on Facebook. The first is taken by advertisers when they choose certain segments of the Facebook population to target: Canadian women who enjoy badminton and Weezer, lacrosse dads over 40 with an interest in white genocide <https://theintercept.com/2018/11/02/facebook-ads-white-supremacy-pittsburgh…>, and so forth. The second is taken by Facebook, when it makes an ad show up on certain peoples’ screens, reconciling the advertiser’s targeting preferences with the flow of people through Facebook’s apps and webpages in a given period of time. Advertisers can see which audiences ended up viewing the ad, but are never permitted to know the underlying logic of how those precise audiences were selected. The new research focuses on the second step of advertising on Facebook, the process of ad /delivery/, rather than on ad /targeting. /Essentially, the researchers created ads without any demographic target at all and watched where Facebook placed them. The results, said the researchers, were disturbing: Critically, we observe significant skew in delivery along gender and racial lines for “real” ads for employment and housing opportunities despite neutral targeting parameters. Our results demonstrate previously unknown mechanisms that can lead to potentially discriminatory ad delivery, even when advertisers set their targeting parameters to be highly inclusive. Rather than targeting a demographic niche, the researchers requested only that their ads reach Facebook users in the United States, leaving matters of ethnicity and gender entirely up to Facebook’s black box. As Facebook itself tells <https://www.facebook.com/business/news/relevance-score> potential advertisers, “We try to show people the ads that are most pertinent to them.” What exactly does the company’s ad-targeting black box, left to its own devices, consider pertinent? Are Facebook’s ad-serving algorithms as prone to bias like so many others <https://www.newscientist.com/article/2166207-discriminating-algorithms-5-ti…>? The answer will not surprise you. For one portion of the study, researchers ran ads for a wide variety of job listings in North Carolina, from janitors to nurses to lawyers, without any further demographic targeting options. With all other things being equal, the study found that “Facebook delivered our ads for jobs in the lumber industry to an audience that was 72% white and 90% men, supermarket cashier positions to an audience of 85% women, and jobs with taxi companies to a 75% black audience even though the target audience we specified was identical for all ads.” Ad displays for “artificial intelligence developer” listings also skewed white, while listings for secretarial work overwhelmingly found their way to female Facebook users. Although Facebook doesn’t permit advertisers to view the racial composition of an ad’s viewers, the researchers said they were able to confidently infer these numbers by cross-referencing the indicators Facebook does provide, particularly regions where users live, which in some states can be cross-referenced with race data held in voter registration records. In the case of housing ads — an area Facebook has already shown in the past has potential for discriminatory abuse <https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers-exclude-users-…> — the results were also heavily skewed along racial lines. “In our experiments,” the researchers wrote, “Facebook delivered our broadly targeted ads for houses for sale to audiences of 75% white users, when ads for rentals were shown to a more demographically balanced audience.” In other cases, the study found that “Facebook delivered some of our housing ads to audiences of over 85% white users while they delivered other ads to over 65% Black users (depending on the content of the ad) even though the ads were targeted identically.” Facebook appeared to algorithmically reinforce stereotypes even in the case of simple, rather boring stock photos, indicating that not only does Facebook automatically scan and classify images on the site as being more “relevant” to men or women, but changes who sees the ad based on whether it includes a picture of, say, a football or a flower. The research took a selection of stereotypically gendered images — a military scene and an MMA fight on the stereotypically male side, a rose as stereotypically female — and altered them so that they would be invisible to the human eye (marking the images as transparent “alpha” channels, in technical terms). They then used these invisible pictures in ads run without any gender-based targeting, yet found Facebook, presumably after analyzing the images with software, made retrograde, gender-based decisions on how to deliver them: Ads with stereotypical macho images were shown mostly to men, even though the men had no idea what they were looking at. The study concluded that “Facebook has an automated image classification mechanism in place that is used to steer different ads towards different subsets of the user population.” In other words, the bias was on Facebook’s end, not in the eye of the beholder. The report comes at an inconvenient time for Facebook, now facing charges from the Department of Housing and Urban Development over its potential to enable advertisers to illegally exclude certain groups <https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/28/tech/facebook-hud-ad-discrimination/>. And although the study is careful to note that “our results only speak to how our particular ads are delivered (i.e., we cannot say how housing or employment ads in general are delivered),” it still concludes that “the significant skew we observe even on a small set of ads suggests that real-world housing and employment ads are likely to experience the same fate.” In other words, even in the absence of bigoted landlords, the advertising platform itself appears inherently prejudiced. A Facebook spokesperson provided the following comment: We stand against discrimination in any form. We’ve made important changes to our ad targeting tools and know that this is only a first step. We’ve been looking at our ad delivery system and have engaged industry leaders, academics, and civil rights experts on this very topic – and we’re exploring more changes. It’s a familiar refrain at this point, and one that will likely do little to reassure those who just want to know that they’ll be provided with the same opportunities as everyone else, even in the context of ubiquitous advertising. The old apologia for targeted advertising is generally that it’s a favor to the consumer, sparing them “irrelevant” ads and instead providing them with opportunities to browse goods and services that are “pertinent” to them. What this shallow reasoning misses is that decisions about pertinence can become self-reinforcing; it’s foolish at best to think that women are more interested in secretarial work because they keep clicking the secretary ads, rather than that they click secretarial ads because it’s all Facebook will show them.

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Exclusive: Google cancels AI ethics board in response to outcry - Vox
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 5, 2019

April 5, 2019

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/4/18295933/google-cancels-ai-ethi… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Facebook’s ad system seems to discriminate by race and gender
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 4, 2019

April 4, 2019

Facebook’s ad system seems to discriminate by race and gender from The Economist https://www.economist.com/business/2019/04/04/facebooks-ad-system-seems-to-… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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No, YouTube is not a library – and why it matters – Sarah T. Roberts | The Illusion of Volition
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 4, 2019

April 4, 2019

https://illusionofvolition.com/2018/03/20/no-youtube-is-not-a-library-and-w… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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GIG-ARTS 2019 Programme is Out! Salerno, 16-17 May 2019: Europe as a Global Player in Internet Governance
by Mauro SANTANIELLO April 4, 2019

April 4, 2019

Car* tutt*, We are glad to announce the preliminary programme of the Third European Multidisciplinary Conference on Global Internet Governance Actors, Regulations, Transactions and Strategies (GIG-ARTS 2019), to be held in Salerno, Italy, on 16-17 May 2019. Please find all details hereafter. Thank you for your interest in this event. *Conference website: *http://events.gig-arts.eu Preliminary programme online: http://events.gig-arts.eu/programme Registration: http://events.gig-arts.eu/registration Venue, transportation and hotels nearby: http://events.gig-arts.eu/venue *Mailing list for updates:* http://tinyurl.com/yc7rvxm4 We are looking forward to welcoming you in Salerno! The Third European Multidisciplinary Conference on Global Internet Governance Actors, Regulations, Transactions and StrategiesGIG-ARTS 2019 – 16-17 May 2019, Salerno "Europe as a Global Player in Internet Governance"Organised by: The Internet & Communication Policy Centre / Department of Political and Social Studies / Università degli Studi di SalernoCo-Sponsored By: The Centre for European Policy Studies, The ECPR Standing Group on Internet and Politics, The Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet), the IAMCR Communication Policy and Technology Section, The ICA Communication Law and Policy Divisionhttp://events.gig-arts.eu - events(a)gig-arts.eu @GigArtsEU - #GigARTS19 *Preliminary Programme* *Day 1 – Thursday 16 May 201908:30-09:00 – Registration* *09:00-09:30 – Welcome SessionAurelio Tommasetti – Chancellor of the University of SalernoGennaro Iorio – Head of Department of Political and Social StudiesVirgilio D'Antonio - Head of Department of Political and Communication Sciences* *Francesco Amoretti & Mauro Santaniello – GIG-ARTS 2019 General Chairs* *09:30-11:00 – Session 1 – Europe as a Global Normative Power**Chair*: *Meryem Marzouki (CNRS & Sorbonne Université, France)* *Discussants*: *Claudia Padovani (Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy) and Teresa Numerico (Università di Roma 3, Italy) * - *Exporting Rule of Law on the Internet: Europe's Potential as a Norm Entrepreneur in Global Internet Governance* Matthias Kettemann (Leibniz Institut for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut, Hamburg, Germany), Wolfgang Kleinwächter (Aarhus University, Germany) and Max Senges (Stanford University and Google Germany) - *Between Business as Usual and Decisive Norm Promotion. The EU’s divergent reactions to the Snowden revelations in Cybersecurity and Data Protection* Wolf J. Schünemann and Stefan Steiger (Hildesheim University, Germany) - *The Role of ‘Europe’ in the Invention of Global Media Governance* Anthony Löwstedt (Webster Vienna Private University, Austria) - *European Perspectives on Legitimacy in ICANN* Hortense Jongen and Jan Aart Scholte (University of Gothenburg, Sweden) *11:00-11:30 – Coffee Break* *11:30-13:00 – Session 2 – The Manufacture of EU Law and Policies**Chair*: *Virgilio D'Antonio (University of Salerno, Italy)* *Discussant*: *Jamal Shahin (VUB, Belgium & University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)* - *When EU governments legislate on the future of the Internet: comparative study of the preferences and bargaining satisfaction of member states in the Council of the EU* Clément Perarnaud (University Pompeu Fabra, Spain) - *The role of experts groups and epistemic communities in EU Internet-related policy-making: an exploratory inquiry* Nicola Palladino (University of Salerno, Italy) - *Power to the people? Evaluating citizen participation in EU online copyright policy* Agnieszka Vetulani Cęgiel (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland) and Trisha Meyer (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium) - *Network Neutrality in the European Union - A Policy Process Analysis* Stefan Gadringer (University of Salzburg, Austria) *13:00-14:30 – Lunch Break* *14:30-15:30 – Roundtable: Towards a Turn to Regulation in the European Internet Governance?**Moderator*: *Mauro Santaniello (University of Salerno)* *Discussion with representatives of public authorities (and/or practitioners, TBC)* *15:30-16:00 - Coffee Break* *16:00-17:30 – Session 3 – European Cybersecurity Strategies and Perspectives**Chair*: *Jan Aart Scholte (University of Gothenburg, Sweden)* *Discussants*: *William J. Drake (University of Zurich, Switzerland) and Lorenzo Pupillo (Centre for European Policy Studies, Belgium)* - *Cyber Security and the constitutive Role of Security Cultures: A Framework of Global Cyber Security Cultures* Madeleine Myatt (University of Bielefeld, Germany) and Domenico Fracchiolla (LUISS University, Italy) -* EU Cyber Diplomacy: the EU as an emerging global Cybersecurity actor* Andrea Calderaro (Cardiff University, United Kingdom) - *Grappling with Multilevel Governance & Global Idea Flow: The European Union & The Internet Governance Forum’s Best Practice Forum on Cyber-security* Nanette Levinson (American University, United States of America) - *Networks of Cooperation and Trust: An analysis of Incident Response in the EU* Louise Marie Hurel (Igarapé Institute, United Kingdom) *17:30-18:00 - Transfer to Salerno city* *19:00-20:00 – Keynote Speech @** (location TBC): Digital Platform Policy: Is EU policy leadership tackling platform power?* *Speaker*: *Robin Mansell (London School of Economics, United Kingdom) * *Chair*: *Francesco Amoretti (University of Salerno, Italy)* *20:00-22:00 - Social event @ (location TBC)* *Day 2 – Friday 17 May 2019* *09:30-11:00 – Session 4 – The Political Economy of Internet Governance in Europe**Chair*: *Michèle Rioux (Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada)* *Discussants*: *Eric Brousseau (Université Paris Dauphine, France) and Adriano Cozzolino (Università L'Orientale, Italy)* - *Regulating the European Data-Driven Economy: A Case Study on the General Data Protection Regulation* Moritz Laurer (CARSA - Innovation and Technology Consultancy, Germany) and Timo Seidl (European University Institute, Italy) - *Governing Mobile Internet Communication: The EU, Private Technical Standards Making and the Pursuit of Co-Existence in Unlicensed Spectrum* Seamus Simpson (University of Salford, United Kingdom) and Imir Rashid (University of Exeter, United Kingdom) - *The Digital Single Market and the commodification of cultural policy. The case of the European copyright reform (2014-2018)* Céleste Bonnamy (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium & Université Paris 1 Panthéon- Sorbonne, France) - *Governing political platforms, a case on the French Digital Council and a start-up* Maud Bernisson (Karlstad University, Sweden) *11:00-11:30 – Coffee Break* *11:30-13:00 – Session 5 – European Democratic Values and Sovereignty* *Chair*: *Yves Schemeil (Sciences Po Grenoble, France)* *Discussants*: *Nicola Palladino (University of Salerno) and Domenico Fracchiolla (LUISS University, Italy)* - *Going Back and Forth: Re-Nationalization of Internet Governance or Further European Push for Internationalization?* Rolf H. Weber (University of Zurich, Switzerland) - *The Power of Networks: Institutionalization and Mobilization in European and Transnational Digital Constitutionalism* Dennis Redeker (Jacobs University Bremen, Germany) - *Populism and EU policy: the battleground of copyright* Giuseppe Micciarelli (University of Salerno, Italy) and Maria Francesca De Tullio (University of Naples Federico II, Italy) - *ODR and European courts. risks and opportunities in terms of equal access to justice and due process of law* Letizia Mingardo (University of Padova, Italy) *13:00-14:30 – Lunch Break* *14:30-16:00 – Session 6 – Data Protection, Privacy and Security in Comparative Perspectives**Chair*: *Nanette S. Levinson (American University Washington DC, USA)* *Discussants*: *Andrea Calderaro (Cardiff University, United Kingdom) and Giuseppe Micciarelli (University of Salerno, Italy)* - *The Russian Cybersecurity Strategy in Comparative Perspective* Mara Morini (University of Genoa, Italy) - *Mapping the Right to be Forgotten in the territory of Freedom of Expression. A review of International and Domestic Case law* Ana Azurmendi (University of Navarra, Spain) - *The Common Goods of Privacy and Data Governance* Anke Obendiek, (Hertie School of Governance, Germany) - *Europe’s global blockchain leadership: strategies and conceptual framework* Marco Crepaldi (University of Turin, Italy) *16:00-16:30 – Concluding Remarks* Mauro Santaniello (PhD) *Internet & Communication Policy Centre * *Department of Political and Social Studies * *Università degli Studi di Salerno * *Via Giovanni Paolo II, 132 84084 Fisciano (SA) - Italy * *E. msantaniello(a)unisa.it <msantaniello(a)unisa.it> * *Skype: internetpolicy * *T. twitter.com/webvoodoo <http://twitter.com/webvoodoo>*

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'Grassroots' Facebook Brexit ads secretly run by staff of Lynton Crosby firm | Politics | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo April 4, 2019

April 4, 2019

Molto preoccupante... Chi monitora la campagna europea su FB? <https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/apr/03/grassroots-facebook-brexit…> A series of hugely influential Facebook advertising campaigns that appear to be separate grassroots movements for a no-deal Brexit are secretly overseen by employees of Sir Lynton Crosby’s lobbying company and a former adviser to Boris Johnson, documents seen by the Guardian reveal. The mysterious groups, which have names such as Mainstream Network and Britain’s Future, appear to be run independently by members of the public and give no hint that they are connected. But in reality they share an administrator who works for Crosby’s CTF Partners and have spent as much as £1m promoting sophisticated targeted adverts aimed at heaping pressure on individual MPs to vote for a hard Brexit. Repeated questions have been raised about who is backing at least a dozen high-spending groups that have flooded MPs’ inboxes with calls to reject Theresa May’s deal. Until now they were thought to be independent entities. But according to the documents, almost all the major pro-Brexit Facebook “grassroots” advertising campaigns in the UK share the same page admins or advertisers. These individuals include employees of CTF Partners and the political director of Boris Johnson’s campaigns to be mayor of London, who has worked closely with Crosby in the past. Their collective Facebook expenditure swamps the amount spent in the last six months by all the UK’s major political parties and the UK government combined. They have paid for thousands of different targeted Facebook ads encouraging members of the public to write to their local MPs and call for the toughest possible exit from the EU, creating the impression of organic public opposition to Theresa May’s deal. [...] Although Facebook has substantially increased the level of transparency around political advertising in recent months, all that is required to run such a campaign is a publicly named individual who is registered to a UK postal address or contact details for a public organisation. There is no true disclosure around a campaign’s financial backers and no UK law requiring financial transparency outside an election period. [...]

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"Microsoft announces it will shut down ebook program and confiscate its customers' libraries"
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 4, 2019

April 4, 2019

*Microsoft announces it will shut down ebook program and confiscate its customers' libraries** * Microsoft has a DRM-locked ebook store that isn't making enough money, so they're shutting it down and taking away every book that every one of its customers acquired effective July 1. Customers will receive refunds. […] Continua qui: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/02/burning-libraries.html

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Microsoft announces it will shut down ebook program and confiscate its customers' libraries
by Giacomo April 3, 2019

April 3, 2019

https://boingboing.net/2019/04/02/burning-libraries.html Microsoft has a DRM-locked ebook store that isn't making enough money, so they're shutting it down and taking away every book that every one of its customers acquired effective July 1. Customers will receive refunds. [...] When I was a bookseller, nothing I could do would result in your losing the book that I sold you. If I regretted selling you a book, I didn't get to break into your house and steal it, even if I left you a cash refund for the price you paid. People sometimes treat me like my decision not to sell my books through Amazon's Audible is irrational (Audible will not let writers or publisher opt to sell their books without DRM), but if you think Amazon is immune to this kind of shenanigans, you are sadly mistaken. My books matter a lot to me. I just paid $8,000 to have a container full of books shipped from a storage locker in the UK to our home in LA so I can be closer to them. The idea that the books I buy can be relegated to some kind of fucking software license is the most grotesque and awful thing I can imagine: if the publishing industry deliberately set out to destroy any sense of intrinsic, civilization-supporting value in literary works, they could not have done a better job.

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A.I. Experts Question Amazon’s Facial-Recognition Technology - The New York Times
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 3, 2019

April 3, 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/technology/amazon-facial-recognition-tec… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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1, 000 Years of Literary Tradition in Rare Persian-Language Manuscripts Now Online at Library of Congress
by Giacomo April 3, 2019

April 3, 2019

https://www.loc.gov/item/prn-19-036/ This collection, including 150 manuscripts with some dating back to the 13th century, also reflects the diversity of religious and confessional traditions within the Persian culture. From the 10th century to the present, Persian became the cultural language for a large region stretching from West Asia to Central and South Asia. Today, Persian is the native language spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and some regions of Central and South Asia and the Caucasus. [...] “These rare Persian-language manuscripts clearly reflect the diversity and cosmopolitan nature of the collection,” said Hirad Dinavari, reference specialist for the collection at the Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division. “Since many of the items originate in India, Central Asia, the Caucasus and regions under Ottoman rule, in addition to the native Persian speaking lands of Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan.”

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