Trucking group says Facebook’s targeted ads have ‘dramatic’ level of discrimination

December 5, 2022

Ryan Witkowski

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A group of female truckers has accused Meta of using practices that “routinely discriminate” against women when it comes to displaying employment ads on Facebook.

On Dec. 1, the group Real Women in Trucking filed a complaint against the social media giant with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In the complaint, the group asserts that Meta – which owns Facebook and Instagram – unlawfully steered dozens of hiring ads from trucking companies and other advertisers to mostly one gender or age group.

Those claims were backed up by data provided by Meta themselves. The 127-page complaint lists 75 ads from Meta’s public archive that show decidedly skewed audiences.

“Our investigation into Facebook’s ad distribution practices – based on data made public by Facebook itself – has revealed that when Facebook distributes job ads to hundreds of millions of Americans, Facebook routinely discriminates based on gender and age when it decides which individuals receive those ads,” the group said in its complaint.

In June, Meta said it planned to introduce a “variance reduction system” to its algorithms to “make sure the audience that ends up seeing a housing ad more closely reflects the eligible targeted audience for that ad.” The announcement came as part of a settlement with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development after the agency accused Meta of violating the Fair Housing Act by targeting ads for housing.

It would seem that system – which Meta says is still in testing – has not solved the issue. Real Women in Trucking called the levels of discrimination going on with Meta’s ad targeting “dramatic.”

“In some cases, even when employers directed Facebook to send their job ads to people of all genders and ages, Facebook delivered the ads to Facebook users who are over 99% male and 99% younger than 55 years old,” the group said. “These disparities are even more glaring when one considers that women make up over 54% of the Facebook users interested in job hunting, and people older than 54 make up over 28% of Facebook users interested in job hunting.

This isn’t the first time the company has come under fire for its advertising practices. In 2019, Meta said it would no longer allow advertisers select age-restricted audiences for job ads. Despite this, the charge cites three specific instances in which the company did just that.

“This is what algorithmic bias looks like in 2022,” the group’s complaint reads. “Facebook routinely steers job ads to nearly all men and younger people when Facebook believes that men and younger people as a whole will be more interested in the job than women and older people … This gender- and age-based algorithmic steering –which often causes job ads to be shown to 90% men (or to 90% women) depending on the position, and ordinarily disfavors older people –is just as unlawful as excluding all women or all older people from receiving job ads on Facebook, a practice that the commission found to be illegal in 2019.”

Meta said in a statement that it was reviewing the complaint.

“Addressing fairness in ads is an industrywide challenge, and we’ve been collaborating with civil rights groups, academics and regulators to advance fairness in our ads system,” the company said. LL

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