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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday December 26 2017, @05:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the legal-as-long-as-you-don't-get-caught dept.

A few weeks ago, Verizon placed an ad on Facebook to recruit applicants for a unit focused on financial planning and analysis. The ad showed a smiling, millennial-aged woman seated at a computer and promised that new hires could look forward to a rewarding career in which they would be "more than just a number."

Some relevant numbers were not immediately evident. The promotion was set to run on the Facebook feeds of users 25 to 36 years old who lived in the nation's capital, or had recently visited there, and had demonstrated an interest in finance. For a vast majority of the hundreds of millions of people who check Facebook every day, the ad did not exist.

ProPublica's joint investigation with The New York Times turned up instances where Verizon, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Target, and Facebook placed recruitment ads "limited to particular age groups", and wrote that "using the system to expose job opportunities only to certain age groups has raised concerns about fairness to older workers".

The Communications Workers of America union agreed: it filed a federal court class action lawsuit (PDF) in San Francisco claiming age discrimination on Wednesday.

[...] Some companies, including Target, State Farm and UPS, defended their targeting as a part of a broader recruitment strategy that reached candidates of all ages. The group of companies making this case included Facebook itself, which ran career ads on its own platform...

In its response, Facebook defended its own age-targeted recruitment advertisements as part of "broader-based recruitment efforts designed to reach all ages and all backgrounds". It added: "We completely reject the allegation that these advertisements are discriminatory."

Facebook wasn't the only platform found with age-targeting: Google and LinkedIn were also pinged in the investigation. LinkedIn changed its system to exclude age, Google did not.

Also reported on The Register


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @07:02PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @07:02PM (#614383)

    The age targeting us something FB offers, but Verizoff's use of it in employment ads is more problematic. Would it be illegal if they advertised in FinanceBro magazine, knowing that only 25 to 40 year old finance bros read it?

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