Abstract

The 2022 settlement between Meta and the U.S. Department of Justice to resolve allegations of discriminatory advertising resulted is a first-of-its-kind change to Meta’s ad delivery system aimed to address algorithmic discrimination in its housing ad delivery. In this work, we explore direct and indirect effects of both the settlement’s choice of terms and the Variance Reduction System (VRS) implemented by Meta on the actual reduction in discrimination.
We first show that the settlement terms allow for an implementation that does not meaningfully improve access to opportunities for individuals. The settlement measures impact of ad delivery in terms of impressions, instead of unique individuals reached by an ad; it allows the platform to level down access, reducing disparities by decreasing the overall access to opportunities; and it allows the platform to selectively apply VRS to only small advertisers.
We then conduct …

Metadata

publication

Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and …, 2025

year

2025

publication date

2025/6/23

authors

Basileal Imana, Zeyu Shen, John Heidemann, Aleksandra Korolova

link

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3715275.3732170

resource_link

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3715275.3732170

book

Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

pages

2616-2629