Meta Stock (NASDAQ:META)
In a U.S. lawsuit filed on Thursday, an advocacy group for female truckers used data from the social media giant to claim that Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META) had improperly targeted hundreds of job advertisements from trucking businesses and other advertisers.
Meta said in June that it will implement a “variance reduction mechanism” into its algorithms to improve the diversity of its Facebook audience for housing and job advertisements across demographics.
The latest charges highlight the problems that would be addressed by the solution Meta is proposing. On Thursday, Meta said that the complaint would be investigated and that testing the new system had begun.
The corporation has said that it is working with civil rights organizations, academia, and regulators to improve the overall fairness of its advertising system.
Meta stock, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, has been under fire for years from civil rights organizations and authorities for facilitating discrimination in its employment and housing listing databases via the use of settings and algorithms. Ads in the United States cannot be biased toward a certain gender or age group.
Upturn, an advocacy group representing Real Women in Trucking in its charge to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, cited Facebook as “one of the go-to resources for these life opportunities” in a statement to the EEOC. “The consequences of this kind of discrimination are far-reaching,” Ebadolahi added.
About eighty advertisements from Meta’s public archive are cited in the lawsuit from Real Women in Trucking as examples of biased viewership.
For instance, a North Carolina company advertising for truck drivers received responses from 11% of those aged 55 and over and 5% of females.
“Of the individuals actively looking for work on Facebook, 54% are women. The percentage of people aged 55 and more is 28%, “Peter Romer-Friedman, partner at Gupta Wessler and legal counsel for Real Women in Trucking, made this statement.
He said job postings had no business being emailed to so many people.
He also said that most businesses aimed to spread their message to a broader audience.
However, the complaint refers to three advertisements in which Meta allowed advertisers to choose age-restricted audiences while promising to disable this feature for employment advertising in 2019.
Romer-Friedman speculates that Meta stock may need help implementing the expected variance reductions if it is having trouble identifying job advertisements.
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Author Shariq Khan 
