Social media giant Facebook has been working closely with external privacy experts and policy stakeholders from around the world to get inputs on increasing transparency in their ads system. One of the important inputs from these experts was to be more transparent about how Meta’s (the company that owns Facebook) machine learning models contribute to the ads that users see.
In a blog post, Meta, that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, said “Being transparent about how we use machine learning is essential because it ensures that people are aware that this technology is a part of our ads system and that they know the types of information it is using.”
“By stepping up our transparency around how our machine learning models work to deliver ads, we aim to help people feel more secure and increase our accountability,” stated the company in the post.
The “Why am I seeing this ad?” tool is a decade-old question which can be used when a user wants clarity, and since then, the company has made a number of betterments for the platform users, to make it more engaging and easier to understand and use.
The company has updated the tool and will start showing new examples and illustrations to the users, explaining how Facebook’s machine-learning models help in connecting various topics to showcase relevant ads to the users. Meta has plans to expand this to Instagram in the future.
During the fourth quarter of 2022, the number of daily active users on Facebook reached two billion, a minor increase on the previous quarter.
According to Statista, when compared with the number of daily active users in the fourth quarter of 2021, the platform has gained around 70 million users. According to its most recent financial report released Meta, Facebook’s ad revenues in 2022 hit $113.6 billion. It’s the second straight year Facebook’s ad revenues have surpassed $100 billion, but represents a 1.1% fall from the previous year. The current volatile macroeconomic landscape has pulled the ad volume down for the platform, believe experts.