© Alexander Pohl / Global Look Press
The ACLU charges, filed with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Tuesday, alleges that Facebook allows employers to target job ads for positions in male-dominated fields exclusively to younger men. The complaint targets Facebook and ten employers who the ACLU says ran gender-discriminatory ads.
"Facebook is violating federal civil rights law. Period," the organization tweeted Tuesday. Under US law, companies are forbidden from discriminating in recruitment and from tailoring job ads to a specific gender or age range.
Among the ten employers are a furniture removal company, a tire fitting business, a temporary labor agency, and a roofing contractor. All were looking to hire men, for jobs traditionally and still mostly done by men.
The ACLU claim that while Facebook is not responsible for the content published by others on its platform, the company "built the architecture for this discriminatory marketing framework, enabled and encouraged advertisers to use it, and delivered the gender-based ads according to employers' sex-based preferences."
The civil rights organization claims that when women are excluded from seeing a certain job ad, they are also excluded from seeing related jobs that they could be eligible for.
Facebook has faced similar criticism before, for allowing housing ads to exclude people based on race, religion, language, and a host of other categories. Facebook agreed to end the practice after the US Department of Housing and Urban Development filed charges against the company in August.
Before ending the practice, Facebook's advertisers could choose from 5,000 identifying characteristics to target ads towards. For example, a Christian bakery could target people who had shown interest in 'the bible' and 'cakes.' Housing providers could exclude people interested in 'Islamic culture' or 'Hinduism,' or more practically, people who were likely to have a 'service dog' or a 'mobility scooter.'
Facebook said that its platform is "no place for discrimination," and it will defend its practices once it reviews the ACLU complaint.
While the same rules would render forced 'diversity' metrics just as illegal, we only see the law invoked when it fits with the politics of nihilism and color revolution.
Ah.., Sorry. That was a comment, wasn't it. I guess I couldn't resist pointing out the obvious. My apologies.
-But what really amazes me is how supposedly smart people don't instantly see through that kind of boondoggle, indeed every boondoggle of the sort, to recognize that they are being played for fools. When did such stupid pet tricks become so effective?
I was recently told that the fundamental difference between myself and "everybody else" was one of trust. I simply don't have enough of this apparently magical substance coursing through my veins.
Why examine situations or compare people's actions against their claims and render decisions based on that? Why do the hard work of thinking at all, when I can just do as everybody else does, outsource the task to an authoritative body, or a preferred echo chamber of in-groupies who will dictate an easy schedule of 'correct think' to me in convenient instagram novelty gifs and imbecilic tweets?
You know how everybody, EVERYBODY implores everybody else to "Think for themselves"?
Well, to quote friggin' instagram... "You Keep Using That Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means."
And there you have it.
The world deserves exactly what it is choosing.