Facebook settled five lawsuits alleging its targeting tools allowed advertisers to exclude certain groups from seeing housing and employment offers.
SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook has agreed to pay out about $5 million to settle five lawsuits and take aggressive steps to block discriminatory advertising on its platforms as part of a sweeping agreement with leading civil rights and labor organizations.
The result of 18 months of negotiations, the deal comes as Facebook finds itself under growing pressure, not just from legal challenges, but from government probes that strike at the heart of its business. Advertising generated nearly all of the company's nearly $56 billion in revenue last year. Sandberg says Facebook's policies already prohibit advertisers from using ad targeting tools to discriminate. And the company has removed thousands of categories that could be used to target protected classes such as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and religion. Now, the company is taking"very protective steps" that she says go beyond what the law requires to ensure discrimination does not occur on Facebook's platforms.
To monitor progress, the National Fair Housing Alliance, the ACLU and the Communication Workers of America will meet with Facebook twice a year for three years. They will be permitted to test Facebook's advertising system to identify issues. Facebook has also agreed to study potential bias by its computer algorithms in ad targeting.
In September, the ACLU and the Outten & Golden law firm, representing the CWA and several individual job seekers, filed charges with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Facebook and a number of employers, alleging they had unlawfully discriminated by targeting job ads on Facebook to younger, male Facebook users. A similar complaint was filed against Facebook in January 2018 by CWA and individual job seekers alleging job ads excluded older workers.
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