Facebook is forming new internal teams dedicated to studying its main social network and Instagram for racial bias, in particular for whether its algorithms trained using artificial intelligence adversely affect Black, Hispanic, and other underrepresented groups. The team will be “tasked with ensuring fairness and equitable product development are present in everything we do,” a Facebook spokesperson told The Verge. “We will continue to work closely with Facebook’s Responsible AI team to ensure we are looking at potential biases across our respective platforms.”

The new equity team — as it’s called within Instagram (a similar team is being formed to study Facebook’s main app and website) — marks a departure for the company, which has historically resisted efforts within the company to study effects of racial bias. The news of Facebook’s new research teams was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. “The racial justice movement is a moment of real significance for our company. Any bias in our systems and policies runs counter to providing a platform for everyone to express themselves,” Vishal Shah, the vice president of product for Instagram, said in a statement given to The Verge. While we’re always working to create a more equitable experience, we are setting up additional efforts to continue this progress — from establishing the Instagram Equity Team to Facebook’s Inclusive Product Council.”

 Facebook is also enduring the final stages of a month-long advertising boycott under the #StopHateForProfit movement organized by the Anti-Defamation League, Color of Change, the NAACP, and other civil rights groups. Last month, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri pledged to overhaul how the company tries to solve problems that Black and other underrepresented groups face on the platform. “It starts with accounting for the experiences and challenges that underrepresented groups, such as our Black community, face when they use Instagram,” Mosseri wrote. “We’ve done a lot of work to better understand the impact our platform has on different groups, and that’s helped us get to where we are today. But I think there’s more to do across some key areas, which fit into our broader company commitments.” Mosseri specifically called out harassment, account verification, distribution, and algorithmic bias as areas he thinks Instagram needs to improve on to better serve Black users.

Source- The Verge