Business

Facebook: Race Data Measurement and Meta’s Commitment to Fair and Inclusive Products

We are heeding calls to better measure whether people’s experiences with our technology differ across race. We have been meeting with the civil rights community, privacy experts, academics, regulators and other organizations to determine the best way to assess how people of different races experience our products. We’re sharing details about technical methods and overall…

Published

6 months ago

November 19, 2021

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We are heeding calls to better measure whether people’s experiences with our technology differ across race.
We have been meeting with the civil rights community, privacy experts, academics, regulators and other organizations to determine the best way to assess how people of different races experience our products.
We’re sharing details about technical methods and overall principles we’re using to approach this work responsibly.

The intersection of technology and civil rights is an emerging space that requires further attention from the entire industry, especially given the perceived rise of digital discrimination and bias. As questions have been raised about technology’s potential effects on members of marginalized communities, we’ve heard the calls for more research.

Today, I want to explain more about our approach to understanding how people from marginalized communities experience Meta technologies. Some people have said that their opportunities are limited or that they’re having a different experience than others, but we don’t have the data to fully understand what may be happening and why. We can’t address what we can’t measure, so establishing a more accurate measurement framework is vital to create more inclusive products, policies and operations across the company.

To do this right, we can’t work alone. We’re consulting with the civil rights community, privacy experts, academics, regulators and other organizations on the best way to measure these potential differences in people’s experiences. As we’ve explored options for measurement, experts reaffirmed that any work we do must take into account privacy, security and transparency.

To start, we plan to introduce a framework for studying our platforms and identifying opportunities to increase fairness when it comes to race in the United States. We have explored using aggregate US Census and ZIP code data, which is an accepted way of measuring demographics in the US. However, this approach has some limitations. To that end, we plan to augment that approach with two methodologies that will produce more accurate insights. We will do this in a way that allows important measurement while honoring people’s privacy:

Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding: For this methodology, we’re exploring a widely used method to estimate and aggregate racial distribution based on ZIP code and surname, informed by publicly available US Census statistics. With the privacy enhancements we’ve added, this method will help us analyze the data using aggregate results.
Off-platform surveys using secure multiparty computation: This methodology is still under development and will use innovative, privacy-enhancing technologies to help us learn potential differences in people’s experiences in the US. In collaboration with partner institutions, we will conduct an opt-in off-platform survey and run measurements while employing privacy-preserving methods.

Learn more about these methodologies in our technical paper. While this work will initially focus on race in the US, it will help us lay the groundwork for how to address concerns from other marginalized communities here and around the world, consistent with our corporate human rights policy.

I joined the company at the beginning of the year to establish a new civil rights organization as part of our commitment following an independent audit of our policies and practices. As civil rights expert Laura Murphy stated in the audit, Meta has a “responsibility to ensure that the algorithms and machine learning models that can have important impacts on billions of people do not have unfair or adverse consequences.” We know that this journey will not be easy, however, we remain committed to this work, doing it thoughtfully, and being transparent about our efforts.

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Business

Facebook: Recognizing Global Accessibility Awareness Day

As an avid outdoor enthusiast and firefighter, Carly P. has always loved being active. After a life-changing injury paralyzed her from the waist down, she felt lost. Carly recaptured her passion for being outside and found a community of people like her through the nonprofit organization Catalyst Sports. Now, she uses Catalyst Sports’ Facebook page…

Published

3 days ago

May 20, 2022

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In addition to providing community to people with disabilities, we’re also working to make the digital world more accessible.

We will demonstrate our latest accessibility features today at our annual Accessibility Summit. Join us at 10:00AM PT for this livestream on the Meta Accessibility Facebook Page. In addition to product demos and updates, we will host an interview with Molly Burke, a digital creator and blind advocate.

Through a video series on the Meta Accessibility Facebook Page, we’re highlighting how people with disabilities connect and build communities through our technologies, much like Carly. We’ve created both the captioned and audio described versions of these stories.

Today, we’re recapping advances we’ve made over the past year to make our technologies more inclusive.

Meta Quest

Audio Accessibility
- Audio balance: This option enables you to adjust the balance of the left and right audio channels for comfort, and to better match your ability to hear in each ear.
- Mono Audio enables you to hear the same audio from both the left and right speakers on your headset.
- You’ll find both features under the Accessibility tab in your headset’s Settings menu.

Adjust Height
- This feature allows you to experience VR from a “standing” vantage point even while reclining or seated. This can improve the VR experience for people who use wheelchairs, have limited mobility or are unable to use the Quest headset while standing.
- We first introduced this as an experimental feature (called Raise View) last June and have now made it permanent after receiving positive feedback from the disability community.
- You can find this feature in the Accessibility tab in Quest’s Settings menu.

Portal

Video relay service (VRS)
- In December, we began supporting video relay service (VRS) applications on Portal for people who use American Sign Language (ASL), through a collaboration with ZP Better Together.
- Through the ZP apps on Portal and human interpreters, people who use American Sign Language can now easily communicate in both English and Spanish.
- Portal’s unique AI-powered camera always keeps you in frame and in focus, even when you’re moving, so your face and hands can always be seen.
Captions
- We’ve also added customizable closed captions for streamed content on TV and Touch, as well as added support for live captions into integrated work productivity apps Zoom and Workplace Live.

Instagram

Auto-generated captions for Feed videos
- In March, we introduced auto-generated captions for Feed videos on iOS and Android in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Vietnamese, Italian, German, Turkish, Russian, Thai, Tagalog, Urdu, Malay, Hindi and Japanese to start.
- More importantly, captions are automatically turned on by default when a creator uploads a video to their Feed. Over 140 million videos were created with auto-generated captions in the last 30 days.
- Creators retain the ability to turn captions off when they choose and viewers can turn captions on or off using on-screen controls.

Stickers on Facebook and Messenger

We added alt text descriptions to the more than 10,000 stickers available on Facebook and Messenger, making it possible for people who are blind and visually impaired to understand and use them.

Avatars

Earlier this year, we introduced the ability to have your same avatar across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Quest.
There are also new avatar options, including over-the-ear hearing aids and cochlear implants in addition to more face shapes, skin tones, expressions, and stickers.
Wheelchairs are now available as stickers on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger so your avatar can better represent who you are or who you want to be.

Open Source

Lexical is a JavaScript framework built to improve text editing on Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger and Workplace, with accessibility as a priority.
In April, Lexical was released into open source to allow the rest of the world to benefit from these improvements.
With this new framework, people can express their ideas in text via dictation, and readers can experience character-by-character navigation — a feature previously unavailable in similar editors.

Reality Labs Research

We’re exploring how improvements in audio quality can enable more realistic presence and perceptual superpowers in augmented and virtual reality— technological advancements that can also help us hear better in noisy environments.
Our team of hearing scientists is also exploring how to reencode sound and present it through closed captioning.
While this is still early research, we are excited to learn more about how emerging audio technologies can improve the lives of people with hearing loss.

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Business

Facebook: Announcing New Products to Make Business Messaging Easier

Published

3 days ago

May 20, 2022

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The way people and businesses communicate is changing. One billion people message with a business each week on WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram Direct — whether it’s DMing brands, browsing product catalogs, asking for support, or interacting with stories. This consumer behavior is accelerating and it’s changing how business gets done. Today at Conversations, our inaugural business messaging event, we discussed how messaging is transforming interactions between people and businesses, and announced new products to make conversations easier.

Introducing Cloud-based API on the WhatsApp Business Platform

Today, Mark Zuckerberg announced we’re opening up the new, cloud-based version of the WhatsApp Business Platform, hosted by Meta, to any business across the world. With this new API, we’re offering free, secure cloud hosting services so businesses and developers can easily access our service within minutes, build directly on top of WhatsApp to customize their experience and increase their response time for their customers. So now, whether a business wants to work with one of our 100+ partners or access our service directly, it will be much faster to get up and running on WhatsApp.

When growing a business, you need smart, robust and easy-to-use conversation tools. For smaller businesses using the WhatsApp Business app, we’re building tools so it’s easier to handle an influx of chats as they grow their customer base.

Launching Recurring Notifications on Messenger

Today we’re announcing a new way for businesses to keep the conversation going with Recurring Notifications. As businesses acquire new customers and begin to scale operations, there’s incredible opportunity to build loyalty and trust — and we believe this is where the value of messaging really shines. This new capability makes it easy to re-engage people right in the messaging thread and deliver tailored messaging at the best time for customers, whether to hear about special promotions, new product drops or tips and tricks.

You can choose the topics you’d like to let people opt-in to, how often customers can hear from you and shape your content, so your messages are always on-brand and relevant. Recurring notifications will also be available for businesses on Instagram this fall.

We also highlighted our click-to-message ads to help customers immediately start conversations with businesses, our CRM platform Kustomer and Meta Business Suite for higher volumes of messages across Facebook, Messenger and Instagram. Read more about our product investments in business messaging on our Meta for Developers blog.

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Business

Facebook: Introducing New Members of the Oversight Board

Today, Meta welcomes the newest members of the Oversight Board who have just been appointed — Paolo Carozza, Khaled Mansour, and Pamela San Martin. Per the Oversight Board Bylaws, we worked together with the board to identify and select these members over the last few months. Over the next few months we will continue to…

Published

3 days ago

May 19, 2022

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Today, Meta welcomes the newest members of the Oversight Board who have just been appointed — Paolo Carozza, Khaled Mansour, and Pamela San Martin.

Per the Oversight Board Bylaws, we worked together with the board to identify and select these members over the last few months. Over the next few months we will continue to support and work with the board to select additional members. The new members reflect a wide range of views and experiences, and will bring a variety of perspectives to the board’s existing expertise.

The Oversight Board represents a unique model for social media governance. From its inception, we knew its impact would come not just from its decisions on individual cases, but also from broader recommendations on how we can improve our policies and processes. In the time since they began hearing cases and issuing decisions and recommendations, they’ve been playing a bigger role in setting precedent and direction for our content policies and how we enforce them. We look forward to welcoming the new board members into this process.

We will update this Newsroom Post as additional members are appointed. We are grateful to all board members for lending their expertise to our content moderation efforts.

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