HOUSTON — Meta - the company formerly known as Facebook - will soon be asking its Instagram users to participate in a survey asking about their race and ethnicity.
The company is partnering with Texas Southern University for the data collection project. Meta says it will help its technologies to advance fairness and inclusion.
Meta, along with officials at TSU, said they're confident the data will be anonymous and won't be linked to individual profiles.
“These platforms - they have access to billions of users, they can collect a lot of data in order to assess their services and to make sure their services are targeting fairly different demographic groups,” TSU Dean of Technology, Science and Engineering Department Dr. Aladdin Sleem said. “At the end of the day, Meta will have their metrics without knowing who said what in their surveys.”
TSU officials said a grant from Meta will help cover the costs for the project - which students will conduct.
"This is going to provide an opportunity, in data, to say, 'OK, this is how some African-Americans look at this. This is how the Latin-X population is using Instagram. This is how we need to assist them and provide opportunities and platforms for them to be entrepreneurs,'" TSU Vice President of Research and Innovation Michelle Penn-Marshall said.
Meta said the information is important because it will help the company learn how well its products work for different races and ethnicities.
Meta said individual survey responses will not and can not be used in ads.
Meta said Instagram users will start seeing a question on their accounts asking if they’d like to participate in a survey. If a user selects ‘yes,’ they’re taken to an external site for the one-question survey, which will ask for a user’s race or ethnicity.
The anonymized result then gets sent to data custodians, TSU is one of them. It’s their job to compile the data and then return that back to Meta.
“There is no way that in any step that any party will have the complete picture,” Sleem said.
Meta said the information is important because it will help the company find out how well its products work for different races and ethnicities.