According to internal policies, Facebook is not allowed to let advertisers target ads on discriminatory data, like age or gender. A new study has found that Facebook’s ad algorithm is discriminating when it comes to employment ads.
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The social media company disabled the ability for advertisers to target their ads for housing and employment based on age and gender, yet researchers have found that there are very definitive trends in these ads that skew towards certain people, which is illegal under federal discrimination law.
The contravention of law pertains to very specific findings in the study. Interestingly, in the US employers are allowed to hire a potential candidate based on “bona fide occupational qualifications.” This means that, for example, a company that makes female clothing is legally allowed to only consider women for modelling positions, where this is generally not allowed.
“Our system takes into account many signals to try and serve people ads they will be most interested in, but we understand the concerns raised in the report,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement responding to the study. “We’ve taken meaningful steps to address issues of discrimination in ads and have teams working on ads fairness today. We’re continuing to work closely with the civil rights community, regulators, and academics on these important matters.”
The study was done by the University of Southern Carolina, which came to a similar conclusion to other studies using a different methodology. The USC focused on Facebook’s employment ad algorithms by creating job listings for jobs that exhibit real-life gender demographic skews despite no real difference in qualifications.
As per their data, a good example is Domino’s Pizza delivery drivers, who are predominantly male while another delivery service, Instacart, are mostly female. When the researchers created job listings for Domino’s drivers and Instacart shoppers and ran them at the same time to the same audiences, the former were largely delivered to men and the latter to women by Facebook’s backend advertising technology.
According to the study, this also held true for listings for software engineer and retail sales associate jobs that also carry the same real-life gender skew. Notably, the study found that the same methodology didn’t find the same patterns when applied to LinkedIn.
