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Facebook Advertising Businesses The Courts

More Firms Used Facebook To Block Older Job Seekers, Lawsuit Alleges (chicagotribune.com) 223

A proposed class-action lawsuit alleging Facebook's ad placement tools facilitate discrimination against older job-seekers has been expanded to identify additional companies. "When Facebook's own algorithm disproportionately directs ads to younger workers at the exclusion of older workers, Facebook and the advertisers who are using Facebook as an agent to send their advertisements are engaging in disparate treatment," a communications union alleged in the amended complaint, citing a legal test for employment discrimination, filed Tuesday in San Francisco federal court. The union added claims under California's fair employment and unfair competition statutes to the lawsuit, which was initially filed in December. Chicago Tribune reports: The Communications Workers of America is suing on behalf of union members and other job seekers who allegedly missed out on employment opportunities because companies used Facebook's ad tools to target people of other ages. The original filing named defendants are Amazon.com Inc., Cox Media Group, Cox Communications Inc. and T-Mobile, as well as what the union estimates to be hundreds of employers and employment agencies who used Facebook's tools to filter out older job hunters when seeking to fill positions. The amended filing adds Ikea, Enterprise Rent-A-Car and the University of Maryland Medical System to its list of companies who allegedly used Facebook's tools to filter by age. Those three entities, as well as Facebook, aren't named defendants in the lawsuit.

The union alleged in its amended lawsuit that Facebook also uses age-filtering in ads intended to find its own new employees. In January, the union filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint about the alleged practice, according to a copy obtained by Bloomberg News. The CWA says it has filed similar claims against dozens of companies, and that the agency has asked those employers, and Facebook, to respond to the allegations. An EEOC spokeswoman declined to confirm or deny the existence of any complaints.

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More Firms Used Facebook To Block Older Job Seekers, Lawsuit Alleges

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    What is it about these companies (I'm a slightly past middle aged man myself at 38) that they do not want the workers who can actually create the products they desire? This obsession with scraping the bottom of the barrel, using immigrants, the young, the inept basically to formulate complex and towering architecture needed for a complex enough system to be worthy of sale. It makes no sense what so ever.

    They are dooming their own bottom line, just look at microsoft since it has been hijacked by foreign in

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      I'm a slightly past middle aged man myself at 38

      Middle aged is generally defined [merriam-webster.com] as 45 to 64. You have another seven years to go before the barista fresh out of college starts offering you a senior citizen discount.

      • by jbengt ( 874751 )

        Middle aged is generally defined [merriam-webster.com] as 45 to 64.

        That would make a 44 year-old a young adult, which I won't go along with, even if they would be young compared to me.
        Childhood is 0 to 18, young adult about 18 to 36, middle age 36 to 54, mature adult 54 to 72, old person 72 to 90, and borrowed time 90 and up.
        Ok, I know that's more arbitrary than accurate, but still better than saying a 64 year old is middle aged - I'm 62, in relatively good health, and I'm definitely not feeling middle a

    • by TheDarkMaster ( 1292526 ) on Wednesday May 30, 2018 @09:36AM (#56699010)
      they do not want experience, they want people new enough to agree to work for peanuts. Experience is expensive and the (very) expensive CEOs childishly still believe they can get away with dirt cheap (young and unskilled developers). And if all goes wrong they (the CEOs) already have a golden parachute on their contract.
    • young kids don't have the experience to say no or that will not work.

    • by swb ( 14022 ) on Wednesday May 30, 2018 @09:36AM (#56699018)

      My theory is that organic economic growth in the capitalist West has somehow stalled, and corporations looking for increasing profits are increasingly relying on cost cutting to boost profits.

      Eliminating older workers in favor of cheaper and more disposable young people and immigrants is a way to obtain cost reductions.

      It also helps to gut the middle class so that you produce an ever larger population of more economically disenfranchised young people who are willing to take low-paying jobs.

      • Capital has become too concentrated, which means less diversity in how it is invested, and less tolerance for filling niche markets (if you're looking to invest hundreds of millions, a business needing an investment of a couple hundred thousand isn't even on your radar). And with stagnating wages, it becomes much harder for people who don't have capital to begin with to save enough to hang their own shingle.

        Without those smaller businesses starting up, there's a lot less economic biodiversity, which res
        • by swb ( 14022 )

          I think there's also a kind of capital trap, where successful companies have so much capital on hand but don't see any way to invest it that guarantees rates of return better than short term investments.

          But at the same time, they're successful enough that there's not enough shareholder demand that they invest in new markets so they don't invest it, and the capital remains tied up in Treasuries rather than flowing through the economy as physical plants, wages and raw material purchases.

      • by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

        My theory is that organic economic growth in the capitalist West has somehow stalled, and corporations looking for increasing profits are increasingly relying on cost cutting to boost profits.

        Organic growth has stalled so now corporations, driven by the stock market, are focusing on cancerous growth. A company could be regularly turning a net profit of tens or millions of dollars annually, but if it misses an arbitrary growth rate by a percentage point or 2 the stock drops. Just like a cancer, incessant growth will eventually kill the host organism, whether a person or a company.

      • You will be either happy or disappointed to know that your theory has a name and has been discussed for decades:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        • by swb ( 14022 )

          Happy to know that it's not just some crazy-ass dumb idea that has no basis in reality. I know that Tyler Cowen also has his own spin on the concept of stagnation.

          Slightly disappointed to note that it's an old idea, somewhat discredited. But I think economic stagnation is kind of an existential risk of any economy, and the failure of any given prediction of stagnation doesn't necessarily mean that any given economic situation can't be described by some kind of structural stagnation.

          I also think its likely

  • No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Wednesday May 30, 2018 @08:27AM (#56698618)
    Tech companies have been finding ways to discriminate against older workers for years. It is no surprise that they now use Facebook to that end. Facebook, with its targeted ad infrastructure, makes it more subtle and easier for the companies to continue to discriminate.
    • LinkedIN (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      All this attention to facebook and none to LinkedIN. Many companies recruit exclusively on LinkedIN.

      And with all these social media sites, it's like if you don't sign up, you don't exist.

      Of course, it's a no brainer to use the APIs of those sites to screen out undesirables.

      No one will ever know.

    • What's amazing to me is that they are even using Facebook in the first place to target younger workers. Most young people don't even use Facebook that much anymore. Facebook in general seems like a terrible place to try to find job applicants, especially in the tech field.

      • ...Most young people don't even use Facebook that much anymore.

        That is far too general to have any meaning. There is a trend downwards in young people (under 25) people using Facebook, but many (most?) still do use Facebook. For the 25+ crowd (one could say, the workers being sought) the usage is still quite high, high enough to make job recruiting worthwhile. (btw, Facebook also includes Instagram)

    • Do you have any proof of this or is it all conjecture? Let's take some example postings for actual jobs I read in the last week.

      Desired qualifications:
      At least seven years performing predictive analytics in a specific vertical Masters or PhD in Machine Learning, Engineering or Statistics Knowledge of this set of vertical specific applications

      How in the world would anybody who is younger than 30 even apply for this job?
  • by Dax123 ( 3565839 ) on Wednesday May 30, 2018 @08:42AM (#56698720)
    At a job interview with Amazon they asked how many years experience did I have with Unix. When I replied over 25 years, one of them said how did you get 25 years and I said well I am 52, and I worked for Sun Micro. The lead said, "I wish you hadn't said that, now I can't hire you, too old". And it ended.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      And so you have your EEO complaint leading to expensive settlement for the company...

    • At a job interview with Amazon they asked how many years experience did I have with Unix. When I replied over 25 years, one of them said how did you get 25 years and I said well I am 52, and I worked for Sun Micro. The lead said, "I wish you hadn't said that, now I can't hire you, too old". And it ended.

      So you got to the interview stage without them bothering to check your DoB? Right.

    • Come to Europe.
      You would be considered a high skilled expert here.

    • by antdude ( 79039 )

      Why would that matter? And if you didn't tell him, then they would still find out.

  • by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Wednesday May 30, 2018 @09:29AM (#56698958)

    What about the discrimination on the part of potential employers against applicants who simply don't use social media at all, and therefore aren't on FB? That can't be fixed by any action on the part of FB or partners. It's also difficult to prove, grossly unfair, and pretty much impossible to do anything about in the absence of legislation and a serious effort at enforcement.

  • I see comments on this subject all the time claiming that older tech workers can't keep up with current technology, and that's the reason companies are excluding them and trying to get rid of them. That's not the reason; the real reason is the oldest reason of all: money. Older = more experienced = worth more = demands more pay. I've got more than one friend who works or used to work for a tech company tell me that they're getting rid of older experienced and competent people in favor of young graduates wit
    • This is how Circuit City went out of business. They laid off all their higher paid sales people. Those people also happened to account for most of the sales.
      • True story: Way back in a previous life, I used to repair coin-op arcade games. I worked for the same guy for years. He was a non-electronics person. In reference to some game PCB that was broken, that I was expressing my doubts as to whether it could be repaired or not, he actually said to me "Can't you just change some chips or something?" like it was all just snap your fingers and it's All Better Now. You can imagine the look I gave him. This is how business people (who are not technical people) think: w
  • I tell sites I am 22. Employers are thrilled when they find out I also have 30 years of experience; except those trying to prove there are no viable citizen/resident candidates.
  • Posting ads in a printed newspaper blocks younger job seekers.
    Posting ads on a community notice board at the supermarket blocks online grocery shoppers seeking jobs.

    etc...

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