A U.S. organization representing the rights of female truckers reportedly complained Thursday, local time, that Facebook parent company Meta illegally directed Facebook ads from many trucking companies and other advertisers to users of one gender or age group.
In response, Meta said it is investigating the allegations made by the women truckers’ group, and in addition, Meta stressed that the new system is still in the process of being tested.
Meta said that fairness in ad delivery is a challenge for the entire advertising industry, and Meta has been working with civil rights organizations, academic institutions and government regulators in the U.S. in the past to advance the fairness of Meta’s ad platform.
Meta owns two major U.S. social media outlets, Facebook and Instagram, both of which are important online advertising platforms. But over the years, Meta has been criticized by U.S. civil rights groups and regulators for providing ad setup and display algorithms that result in an unfair display of job ads and real estate ads to the public. And in such ads, U.S. law prohibits discriminatory display based on gender or age.
Mitra Ebadolahi, senior program director at Upturn, the advocacy organization that filed the complaint with the Fair Employment Opportunity Commission, reportedly said that for many female truck drivers, Facebook is a platform where they often look for job opportunities, so the negative social impact of discriminatory display of Meta ads is far-reaching.
In its complaint, Upturn cited 80 of Meta’s job ads from publicly available databases that suggest distorted audience selection for Facebook ads.
For example, a North Carolina employer posted a Facebook ad for a truck driver, but only 5 percent of all audiences shown the ad were female and 11 percent were 55 or older.
Peter Romer-Friedman of Gupta & Wiesler, the attorney representing the organization, said that the distribution of users shows that 54 percent of Facebook users viewing the ad are women and 28 percent are 55 or older.
The fact that only a small percentage of this user base sees the desired job ads is completely unjustified.
The vast majority of employers, says Romon-Friedman, actually want their job ads to be seen by as large an audience as possible.
But this time the complaint cites three examples of ads that point to Meta’s unfair distribution by letting advertisers select age-specific audiences for their ads. Meta is reportedly rolling out this option in 2019, with the aim of filtering ad audiences.
In June, Meta announced that it would introduce a new mechanism for its online ad display algorithm called the “Change Reduction System” to allow ads in two categories – real estate and jobs – to reach as diverse an audience as possible, across gender and age groups, on its Facebook platform.
The allegations by the truckers’ group mentioned above may prove that Meta’s “change reduction system” has technical problems.
If Meta is having trouble targeting its job ads, it basically suggests that the company will also face problems if it deploys the so-called “change reduction system,” according to Romon Friedman.
