Many Job Ads on Facebook Illegally Exclude Women, ACLU Says (nbcnews.com)

Facebook's advertising platform is being used by prospective employers to discriminate against women, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday. From a report: The American Civil Liberties Union, joined by a labor union and a law firm that specializes in representing employees, has filed a written charge against Facebook with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that enforces anti-discrimination laws in the workplace. The charge asks for an investigation of the social media company and an injunction against what it calls discriminatory practices at a company with a sizable influence over the U.S. labor market. It also claims Facebook's system violates anti-discrimination provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The social network has faced sustained criticism for years that it fails to stop discriminatory ads of various kinds, from housing ads that exclude certain races to job ads targeted only at younger workers. In August, Facebook said it would remove 5,000 targeted advertising options from its platform in an effort to prevent discrimination.

Comments

ACLU is a hate group

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't wait until they go belly up.

Everything is "discriminatory"

[butchersong]

This seems pretty nonsensical to me. The entire point of advertising is to reach those groups most likely to respond to your product. Life without discrimination isn't even really life.. you can't even acknowledge a difference between right and wrong, good or evil. It's like we're trying to unmake ourselves.

Re:Everything is "discriminatory"

[SirSlud]

Job wanted ads are not the same as advertising for consumer products and services. A job is not a product - they are two different things treated in very different ways by the legal system.

Re:Everything is "discriminatory"

[jedidiah]

Job ads and housing ads are treated exactly the same. That's why this issue has come up in the past on that very subject (housing).

Civil Rights laws have rather loose "result based" standards that probably seem counter-intutitive to a lot of civil libertines.

You can't even avoid advertising to people. What constitutes that sort of thing isn't intuitive to a layman.

Even excluding convicted criminals can be a problem.

Re:Everything is "discriminatory"

[SirSlud]

I can't believe some people are really going to defend something like a job posting site offering the ability to employers to say "I only want men to know about this job." That's not a complicated case for discrimination. Newspapers and job posting websites like monster didn't offer protected class attribute targeting and employers didn't find this so economically burdensome as to not to advertise in them so it's pretty stupid to charge that this is something that employers need to be able to do as the cost of making the job market significantly less transparent for everybody.

Re:Everything is "discriminatory"

[butchersong]

It seems fairly just on its face but say I have a product that is an oil for people with African phenotype hair. It would be crazy for me to be sued for targeting African Americans. What if I wanted sales people for my product? Shouldn't I be able to publish an ad that targets African Americans that will actually be able to successfully market it for me? A white chick with straight blonde hair probably isn't going to be my best salesperson.

Re:Everything is "discriminatory"

[rickb928]

"The entire point of advertising is to reach those groups most likely to respond to your product."

Employment ads often are intended to reach those candidates most qualified, primarily, and secondarily most likely to respond.

Qualification cannot be, legally, determined by race, color, creed, national origin, sex, age, and a few other categories I've forgotten.

So you cannot legally restrict advertising based on these and other criteria. In fact, even location is a challenging criteria, as zip code or specific region might be discriminatory. So if you're hiring in Redmond, for instance, advertising in just a few zip codes in SF might be a violation, while just spewing it to all of SF Bay Area would probably not be.

Re:Everything is "discriminatory"

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems pretty nonsensical to me. The entire point of advertising is to reach those groups most likely to respond to your product. Life without discrimination isn't even really life.. you can't even acknowledge a difference between right and wrong, good or evil. It's like we're trying to unmake ourselves.

That is what happens when you allow the Legal Industrial Complex to convince every American that they're offended by every fucking thing, or should be.

And of course they should sue someone because of it.

This is exactly how we ended up here in the Land of the Perpetually Offended. The irony? We fight every day to retain Freedom of Speech, and yet we're working very quickly at the same time to utterly destroy it with this addiction to political correctness.

Re:Everything is "discriminatory"

[sunking2]

You seem to be comparing this to advertisers who specific target ads in say ebony, or on BET. However it's not quite the same thing.

I think the housing example is the clearest example of where this is obviously wrong. There are strong laws against discrimination in housing and specifically not showing your ad to a segment of the population is clearly discriminatory.

Targeting is fine, exclusion isn't.

Re:Everything is "discriminatory"

[drinkypoo]

Job ads and housing ads are treated exactly the same. That's why this issue has come up in the past on that very subject (housing).

Yes, they're treated the same, which is to say that Facebook intentionally created a tool that enables discrimination. There shouldn't even be discriminatory options presented when you create an advertisement for a job or a rental, but that's how Facebook authored the tool.

Re:Everything is "discriminatory"

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe some people are really going to defend something like a job posting site offering the ability to employers to say "I only want men to know about this job."

Some people believe in freedom, including the freedom to choose how you target advertising that you are paying for. Other people believe it is a valid and reasonable function of the police power of the state to force people to spend their money against their wishes. Therein lies the dichotomy. Freedom or not freedom. Anti-freedom advocates know their position is morally inferior, which is why they expend a tremendous amount of energy exercising the mental gymnastics required to define "freedom" as requiring people to behave a certain way under penalty of imprisonment.

Strawman

[rsilvergun]

you're equating discriminating between chocolate and vanilla ice cream lovers to gender discrimination. The world is just a tad more nuanced than that.

If I can risk strawmaning myself for a bit here, I think the problem is we've been too far removed from the worst of discrimination for too long. We forget too easily that women didn't used to vote, could be beaten and even raped with impunity, couldn't own property or were themselves property. What's crazy is there's large swaths of the world where all this is still true and we turn a blind eye to it. There's also a sizable minority of regressives who want to turn back the clock. Some (Jordon Peterson comes to mind) have pretty large followings and speak in pretty reasonable terms...

Re:Strawman

[Scroatzilla]

>> Jordon Peterson comes to mind

So what you're saying is that you have seen hit pieces on Jordan Peterson, have no idea what he says, and are now using him in your vague argument advocating for social justice while completely ignoring the agency of women to make their own life choices.

Re:Don't you love it, when

[GameboyRMH]

Liberals happily "eat their own" because they have these things called morals and principles, rather than just simple party tribalism.