The Facebook advertising platform and the law
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has reported the social networking giant to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for a possible breach of equal rights legislation.
Just like in the UK, many countries have employment laws which include anti-discrimination legislation in the recruitment process so that you cannot discriminate against people on the basis of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or age. Legislation alone cannot change people's attitudes, but it can stop the most blatant abuses appearing in job adverts. However, Facebook's advertising platform has inadvertently created a back door to discrimination in employment.
Facebook may call itself a social media company but really it is an advertising platform. It is in the business of profiling every personal detail of your life, including your race, gender, sexual orientation, political leanings, and who you socialise with, what your hobbies and interests are, even how many children and pets you have, all so that it can sell highly targeted advert slots to its advertising customers. Facebook knows more about you than you do.
ACLU says it has found examples of highly paid blue collar jobs in industries which are traditionally a male-dominated workforce, which are being advertised exclusively to young male Facebook users. Whilst the ads themselves might not go so far as to say "women need not apply", if they are being shown exclusively to young men, it achieves much the same thing. Similarly, an investigation by ProPublica (an independent not-for-profit news agency) has found that Uber has exclusively targeted young men in 87 out of 91 of its recruitment campaigns advertised on Facebook.
Perhaps most worrying is that Facebook offers its advertisers a tool called Lookalike targeting. This allows job advertisers to target Facebook users who have a similar background to their current employees. On the face of it, that sounds like a good way to find similarly qualified people who will fit in with your team, but if your team is predominantly young white male, so too will be your lookalike candidates. This may lead to organisations unwittingly discriminating against certain groups, or perhaps allow them to knowingly discriminate in private whilst shifting the blame to Facebook's tool should anyone notice and complain.
Overall, Facebook has my sympathies in this instance. It may have developed a platform which allows advertising to be targeted at very specific groups of users, but it is the people using that tool who are the ones consciously side-stepping the concept of equal opportunity.
27th September 2018
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.