Facebook faces lawsuit for hiding job ads from women

The American Civil Liberties Union ACLU is suing Facebook on behalf of three women job seekers who accused the social media giant of posting ads that are shown only to men The ACLU along with the Communications Workers of America and the employment law firm Outten amp Golden LLP on Tuesday filed charges with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against FacebookThe women job seekers accused Facebook for targeting ads for jobs in maledominated fields to younger male Facebook users only excluding all women and nonbinary individuals as well as older male usersThe case is brought on behalf of three job seekers and the Communications Workers of America on behalf of a proposed class of millions of job applicants It alleges that these job advertising practices violate federal civil rights laws prohibiting sex and age discrimination in employment Galen Sherwin from ACLU Womens Rights Project wrote in a blog postFacebook requires users to identify their sex in the binary categories of male or female in order to even open an account While users can later change their sex designation and select from among a few dozen options to describe their gender identity Facebook still requires users to choose gendered pronouns male female or neutral which it then offers to advertisers for purposes of genderbased ad targetingFacebook delivers the ad accordingly including a notice that the user is seeing the ad because of their sex the ACLU saidThe lawsuit claimed that Facebook let 10 employers including a police department to run advertisements excluding women and nonbinary users Facebook responded to the allegations saying there is no place for discrimination on FacebookIts strictly prohibited in our policies and over the past year weve strengthened our systems to further protect against misuse Download reported quoting a Facebook spokesperson Facebook is reviewing the complaint and look forward to defending our practices the spokesperson addedAccording to the ACLU Facebook also offers advertisers the ability to use what it calls Lookalike Targeting which allows advertisers to target customers with traits similar to those of their customer base Its important to note that online platforms like Facebook are generally not liable for content published by othersBut in this case Facebook is doing much more than merely publishing content created by others It has built the architecture for this discriminatory marketing framework enabled and encouraged advertisers to use it and delivered the genderbased ads according to employers sexbased preferences the ACLU emphasisedFacebook must change its platform to prevent advertisers from exploiting user data for discriminatory purposes and ensure once and for all that all users regardless of gender race age or other protected status are given a fair shake said the ACLUCatch up on all the latest Crime National International and Hatke news here Also download the new midday Android and iOS apps to get latest updatesThis story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed agencies Midday accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability trustworthiness reliability and data of the text Midday managementmiddaycom reserves the sole right to alter delete or remove without notice the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever