4 ms·

> Not just Facebook, but any targeted advertising platform that can target based on demographic could do this. I'd like to point out that specifically you can

> Not just Facebook, but any targeted advertising platform that can target based on demographic could do this. I'd like to point out that specifically you can NOT do this on Facebook any more, or at least not if Facebook find it out. They make you mark your ads as being job posts, and remove demographic targeting from that. The headline here is irritating, because the headline being shown is two years old. The headline should be the second half of it, which is: "After two years the Federal Government confirms demographic advertising of jobs is illegal"

MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
Seems pointless to me. What are they gonna do, hire those folks they meant to exclude anyway when they show up?
- black_puppydog 7y ago
  While we're at it: why bother with any sort of anti-discrimination effort? Haters' gonna hate after all. /s
  - hutzlibu 7y ago
    There is a difference between accepting discrimination, or trying to enforce antidiscrimination. Make such things open, talk and discuss about it, yes! But when you discriminate to counter discrimination for example, than I believe something went wrong.
- quietbritishjim 7y ago
  It depends. If the goal was to exclude women or old people no matter how qualified they are then you're right, they could just be excluded at a later stage. But if goal was to save money or reach more relevant people based on the assumption that there are fewer old people and women with necessary qualifications then they actually might hire them once they've applied. Now I think about it, even in the first case it could make a difference. Rejecting an application from a real individual based on prejudice might be harder to do, due to a stronger feeling of wrongness, than just unchecking a box labelled "female".
- peteretep 7y ago
  I think the idea here is to reduce ad spend rather than to discriminate, but it has the side effect of the latter. You can be perfectly willing to hire a 55 year old female construction worker, but you’ll probably save money by only advertising construction jobs to men aged 20-50.
- honzzz 7y ago
  As someone who is not really young anymore, I would prefer not being shown those ads. They are not going to hire me anyway when I show up and they see me so I am just going to waste my time... and even if they were somehow forced to hire me, I don't want to work with people who do not want work with me. Some problems cannot be illegalized away.
JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> The headline here is irritating A newly-public EEOC ruling resulting from investigative journalism around explicitly discriminatory hiring practices facilitated (and profited from) by one of the more morally-bankrupt technology companies of our time is announced, and your gripe is the journalists aren’t giving Facebook enough credit? A lot of discrimination happened while Facebook hadn’t fixed the problem. Discrimination which Facebook profited from. Facebook decided to enter the job, credit and real estate ad markets, but didn’t care enough to think through the details. Recent history has been Facebook et al being brazenly lawless, making money from it, and then getting away with a slap on the wrist. The government starting to show teeth is news, and stating their confirmed finding is a fair headline.
- peteretep 7y ago
  > and your gripe is the journalists aren’t giving Facebook enough credit? My gripe is that the headline _as it currently is on HN_ is two years out of date, and that the real headline is "Government rules targeting job ads using demographics is illegal".
  - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    The headline is “Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers From Seeing Job Ads. The Federal Government Thinks That’s Illegal.“ On HN, that’s truncates to the first sentence, but “used” is in the past tense. The information you claim lost was just compressed into the grammar. In contrast, one of the contemporaneous headlines was “Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men” [1], i.e. in the present tense. [1] https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-is-letting-job-advertisers-target-only-men https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-is-letting-job-a...
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      I guess GP is essentially (fairly) complaining that "used" can mean both "a week ago" and "two years ago", and this being headline of news strongly implies the former over the latter. Try to mentally prepend "Two years ago," to the existing headline, and notice how much less outrageous it reads.

MrBuddyCasino 7y ago

Seems pointless to me. What are they gonna do, hire those folks they meant to exclude anyway when they show up?

black_puppydog 7y ago
While we're at it: why bother with any sort of anti-discrimination effort? Haters' gonna hate after all. /s
- hutzlibu 7y ago
  There is a difference between accepting discrimination, or trying to enforce antidiscrimination. Make such things open, talk and discuss about it, yes! But when you discriminate to counter discrimination for example, than I believe something went wrong.
quietbritishjim 7y ago
It depends. If the goal was to exclude women or old people no matter how qualified they are then you're right, they could just be excluded at a later stage. But if goal was to save money or reach more relevant people based on the assumption that there are fewer old people and women with necessary qualifications then they actually might hire them once they've applied. Now I think about it, even in the first case it could make a difference. Rejecting an application from a real individual based on prejudice might be harder to do, due to a stronger feeling of wrongness, than just unchecking a box labelled "female".
peteretep 7y ago
I think the idea here is to reduce ad spend rather than to discriminate, but it has the side effect of the latter. You can be perfectly willing to hire a 55 year old female construction worker, but you’ll probably save money by only advertising construction jobs to men aged 20-50.
honzzz 7y ago
As someone who is not really young anymore, I would prefer not being shown those ads. They are not going to hire me anyway when I show up and they see me so I am just going to waste my time... and even if they were somehow forced to hire me, I don't want to work with people who do not want work with me. Some problems cannot be illegalized away.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago

> The headline here is irritating A newly-public EEOC ruling resulting from investigative journalism around explicitly discriminatory hiring practices facilitated (and profited from) by one of the more morally-bankrupt technology companies of our time is announced, and your gripe is the journalists aren’t giving Facebook enough credit? A lot of discrimination happened while Facebook hadn’t fixed the problem. Discrimination which Facebook profited from. Facebook decided to enter the job, credit and real estate ad markets, but didn’t care enough to think through the details. Recent history has been Facebook et al being brazenly lawless, making money from it, and then getting away with a slap on the wrist. The government starting to show teeth is news, and stating their confirmed finding is a fair headline.

peteretep 7y ago
> and your gripe is the journalists aren’t giving Facebook enough credit? My gripe is that the headline _as it currently is on HN_ is two years out of date, and that the real headline is "Government rules targeting job ads using demographics is illegal".
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  The headline is “Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers From Seeing Job Ads. The Federal Government Thinks That’s Illegal.“ On HN, that’s truncates to the first sentence, but “used” is in the past tense. The information you claim lost was just compressed into the grammar. In contrast, one of the contemporaneous headlines was “Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men” [1], i.e. in the present tense. [1] https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-is-letting-job-advertisers-target-only-men https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-is-letting-job-a...
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    I guess GP is essentially (fairly) complaining that "used" can mean both "a week ago" and "two years ago", and this being headline of news strongly implies the former over the latter. Try to mentally prepend "Two years ago," to the existing headline, and notice how much less outrageous it reads.