Among
the companies we found doing it: Amazon, Verizon, UPS and Facebook
itself. “It’s blatantly unlawful,” said one employment law expert.
by Julia Angwin, ProPublica, Noam Scheiber, The New York Times, and Ariana Tobin, ProPublica'
This story was co-published with The New York Times.
A few weeks ago, Verizon placed an ad on Facebook to recruit
applicants for a unit focused on financial planning and analysis. The ad
showed a smiling, millennial-aged woman seated at a computer and
promised that new hires could look forward to a rewarding career in
which they would be “more than just a number.”
Some relevant numbers were not immediately evident. The promotion was
set to run on the Facebook feeds of users 25 to 36 years old who lived
in the nation’s capital, or had recently visited there, and had
demonstrated an interest in finance. For a vast majority of the hundreds
of millions of people who check Facebook every day, the ad did not
exist.
Verizon is among dozens of the nation's leading employers — including Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Target and Facebook
itself — that placed recruitment ads limited to particular age groups,
an investigation by ProPublica and The New York Times has found.
The ability of advertisers to deliver their message to the precise
audience most likely to respond is the cornerstone of Facebook’s
business model. But using the system to expose job opportunities only to
certain age groups has raised concerns about fairness to older workers.
Several experts questioned whether the practice is in keeping with
the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, which
prohibits bias against people 40 or older in hiring or employment. Many
jurisdictions make it a crime to “aid” or “abet” age discrimination, a
provision that could apply to companies like Facebook that distribute
job ads.
“It’s blatantly unlawful,” said Debra Katz, a Washington employment lawyer who represents victims of discrimination.
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