Religion Biased Algorithms Continue to Depict How Facebook Doesn’t Believe in Free Speech

Facebook’s brand image has taken a critical hit long ago falling from the top ten global brands list, the brand value has gone down by remarkable margins as the platform fell short in living up to its own standards and promises and continued making headlines for censure. Amid big scandals like Cambridge Analytica, data leaks, congressional scrutiny, the social media giant has constantly been under the radar for preferring certain gender, ethics groups, and race over others as seen in the company’s allegedly flawed ad-serving algorithm. 

Owing to its discriminatory ways, Facebook became a subject of critics’ accusations in October 2019 when the social media giant faced a class-action lawsuit for charges of bias against gender and age. To substantiate, with the use of several advertising experiments, researchers from Northeastern University, the University of South California demonstrated in a study that Facebook has been discriminatory in ad targeting for years now and indeed has an automated advertising system delivering ads to selected audiences. 

It’s a well-established fact that algorithms are biased and Facebook has been no exception to it. To give you an idea, in 2019, the tech giant faced legal charges by the US government for allowing advertisers to deliberately target ads on the basis of religion, race, and gender – businesses could exclude people of a certain race, age  or gender from viewing housing ads, a blatant violation of Fair Housing Act. While settling its case, the company said that it won’t be allowing the businesses to targets ads in discriminating ways, however, the issues were never truly addressed given the recent biases in Facebook’s actions. 

‘The Enlightened souls(https://6enlightened.blogspot.com/) is a spiritual group posting content regarding enlightenment, spirituality, ancient spiritual practices, goddess worship and etc., the spiritual website became one of the latest victims of Facebook’s biased ad-targeting algorithms. 

Religion bias in particular as Facebook removed one of their ads containing images of the goddess ‘Kali’ along with other goddesses labeling it as sexual content. 

Later, Facebook was seen to be running a Netflix ad about a show wherein the girl was almost naked. The findings are critical of Facebook’s claims regarding ‘changed Ad tools’ wherein the tech giant promised to amend its ways of managing the advertisements and preventing discrimination against certain groups, gender, religion, or age. 

Disappointed by Facebook’s never-ending bias and existing issues despite the changes made by the company, 6enlightened made the decision of cutting Facebook off and using Twitter as the only social media.

FACEBOOK SHOULD STOP SUPPRESSING FREE SPEECH 

Given a whopping 2.5 million people use at least one of the Facebook’s app, the social media platform should be more responsible in its advertising ways, however, unfortunately, the platform doesn’t appear to believe in free speech but in censorship that they have actively practiced – evidently so for years now.