Recently, Meta has shifted towards AI-mediated ad targeting mechanisms that do not require advertisers to provide detailed targeting criteria, likely driven by excitement over AI capabilities as well as new data privacy policies and targeting changes agreed upon in civil rights settlements. At the same time, Meta has touted their ad preference controls as an effective mechanism for users to control the ads they see. Furthermore, Meta markets their targeting explanations as a transparency tool that allows users to understand why they saw certain ads and inform actions to control future ads. Our study evaluates the effectiveness of Meta's "See less" ad control and the actionability of ad targeting explanations following the shift to AI-mediated targeting. We conduct a large-scale study, randomly assigning participants to mark "See less" to Body Weight Control or Parenting topics, and collecting the ads and targeting explanations Meta shows to participants before and after the intervention. We find that utilizing the "See less" ad control for the topics we study does not significantly reduce the number of ads shown by Meta on these topics, and that the control is less effective for some users whose demographics are correlated with the topic. Furthermore, we find that the majority of ad targeting explanations for local ads made no reference to location-specific targeting criteria, and did not inform users why ads related to the topics they marked to "See less" of continued to be delivered. We hypothesize that the poor effectiveness of controls and lack of actionability in explanations are the result of the shift to AI-mediated targeting, for which explainability and transparency tools have not yet been developed. Our work thus provides evidence for the need of new methods for transparency and user control, suitable and reflective of increasingly complex AI-mediated ad delivery systems.

翻译：近期，Meta已转向无需广告主提供详细定向标准的AI驱动广告定向机制，这一转变可能源于对AI能力的乐观预期，以及数据隐私新政策与民权和解协议达成的定向变更要求。与此同时，Meta将其广告偏好控制功能宣传为用户管理所见广告的有效工具。此外，Meta将其定向解释机制定位为透明度工具，声称能帮助用户理解广告展示原因并指导其控制未来广告的行为。本研究评估了Meta在转向AI驱动定向后，“减少此类内容”广告控制功能的有效性及广告定向解释的可操作性。我们开展了一项大规模研究：随机分配参与者对体重控制或育儿主题标记“减少此类内容”，并收集干预前后Meta向参与者展示的广告及定向解释。研究发现，针对所研究主题使用“减少此类内容”控制功能并未显著减少Meta在该主题下展示的广告数量，且该控制对某些人口统计特征与主题相关的用户效果更弱。此外，研究发现大多数本地广告的定向解释未提及地理位置定向标准，亦未向用户说明其标记“减少此类内容”的主题相关广告为何持续展示。我们推测，控制功能效果欠佳与解释缺乏可操作性的现象，源于向AI驱动定向的转型过程中尚未开发出相应的可解释性与透明度工具。本研究由此证明，亟需开发适用于日益复杂的AI驱动广告投放系统、且能反映其特性的透明度与用户控制新方法。