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Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems to be a textbook form of discrimination.
It's not, though. When I buy a page in Cosmo or something, I'm doing that with the intent and result that mostly women will see it. If targeted ads were illegal, it's hard to see how any publication with non-representative demographics could sell ads at all.
So does this mean that targeted ads are now considered discrimination?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not, though. When I buy a page in Cosmo or something, I'm doing that with the intent and result that mostly women will see it. If targeted ads were illegal, it's hard to see how any publication with non-representative demographics could sell ads at all.
You hire people through ads in Cosmo? I doubt that.
But the reality is that the modern world seems to seriously suck at figuring out how to help people find the right kind of job for themselves or help employers find the right people for the job. I keep thinking "Surely, there must be a better way than what we are doing currently."
Maybe if we worked on solving that issue we would see less of this issue. Like if it is a job for writing HTML and you write HTML, there are ways to find you based on that and it won't matter what your gender or age is.
https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising-disc...
Here's one: https://assets.propublica.org/images/articles/20171121-faceb...
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I'm not sure if there was anything deliberate here. It's possible the companies targeted the jobs ads with factors or attributes that were correlated with younger men by the Facebook algorithm.
Being deliberate is not required: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact
I wonder if you could argue that advertising in a particular way is a business necessity because without doing so, the business cannot maintain competitive viability in reaching necessary candidates.
Just for a devil’s advocate example, suppose that travelling to university recruiting fairs to recruit for computer science job listings has a disparate impact against female candidates, because the gender composition of university programs in computer science are heavily skewed towards male applicants.
But university program graduates may be the only qualified type of candidate for the position, so simply not targeting candidates in the male-overrepresented way (i.e. not attending these university job fairs) would be debilitating and hugely damaging for employers who require those qualified candidates to be competitive in the market.
Wow, I didn't expect to see CapitalOne or Edward Jones on that list. I kind of figured it would be a bunch of smaller companies that were either ignorant of the law or, more likely, used to playing fast and loose without consequences.
(Disclaimer: I work for such a platform)
it's called ad targeting. If the govt. wants to pay for those low converting clicks/impressions, then i'm sure they, these employers, will be glad to serve ads to everyone.
The conversion rate for each demographic is irrelevant in relation to the protected classes. Every person has an equal right to see the adverts and apply or not, according to their decision.
That is what it means to be an Equal Opportunity Employer -- it is the employers' responsibility to bear the costs of giving every person an equal opportunity.
And, frankly, not being an equal-opportunity employer, especially in times of high employment rates, is simply stupid -- you bypass a lot of available talent for no good reason (& no, your biases and assumptions are not good reasons).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not, though. When I buy a page in Cosmo or something, I'm doing that with the intent and result that mostly women will see it. If targeted ads were illegal, it's hard to see how any publication with non-representative demographics could sell ads at all.
Yes but you don't control if a man or an old person can buy the magazine or not.
Here is how I think about it: If my intention is to discriminate against men and publish an ad in a female magazine, sure, I cant control if a man buys and sees the ad or not. But discrimination was my intention to begin with regardless of how effective my efforts were. Besides, those efforts will be pretty effective. Instead of magazine advertising being 100% effective - as is in the case of FB targeted advertising - they will be just slightly less effective (lets say 90% or w/e number you want to put here). That´s because in the magazine´s case we know for certain that that vast majority of female magazine consumption is done by women - That´s literally what they are made for.
So in a sense, we are arguing about degrees of effectiveness rather than the nature of discrimination. Not only is this a slippery slope, but imo it flips everything in business on its head as having a target audience for your product or a service will be considered discriminatory!
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Yes but you don't control if a man or an old person can buy the magazine or not.
While true, its a bit of a nitpick and misses the point GP made.
If facebook displays housing ads only to white people a black person is very likely not even aware that they're being discriminated against in some specific way, the entire control is in the hands of facebook and the ad buyer, and intransparent.
The situation would be equivalent if facebook gave you complete control over their algorithm and let you choose what type of ads you want to be exposed to. Which would make discrimination much less of an issue. Or the other way around, the current facebook situation would be akin to the store owner quickly cutting the housing ads out of cosmo as soon as black people walk into the store.
