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Comment by poulsbohemian | Hacker News Reader

It's anecdata, but if I ask my teen daughter, Facebook is for older people, and the kids are all using things that I've never even heard of. So not sure how you can really prove discrimination. There is some demographic skewing if you advertise on Facebook vs. other channels, but not sure you can really call it an age issue. Not sure what to make of the social marketing guy in the article -- seems like if you are looking for a social marketing person, then Facebook would be a logical place to advertise...

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Despite significantly increasing its total number of users since 2014, Facebook has many fewer users in the 13-17 and 18-24 brackets. The 13-17s dropped 40% in three years.

https://isl.co/2017/02/2017-facebook-demographic-report-adul...

Facebook knows the age of the people it displays ads to. Part of their value proposition is that you can use this data to show certain ads to people of a certain age. In the case of job postings this is explicitly illegal discrimination. The average age of Facebook users is completely unrelated.

>The average age of Facebook users is completely unrelated.

No it isn't -- to make an extreme point, if 100% of the audience is > 50 years old, it wouldn't matter which age group you are targeting because your target demographic isn't there. The poster below, who points to younger generations fleeing Facebook are exactly in line with my point -- the 20-somethings are on to Insta-chat-whatevers next. If you really wanted to discriminate by age, you'd go there instead. That stated -- of course if the advertisers are setting their ads to only show to certain age groups, then they are discriminating -- but that's true regardless of the medium.

For what it's worth, I'm not on any of these social networks, unless HN counts. And yes, my life is better for it.

1) Less than 100% of the audience (Facebook users) are > 50 so your point is irrelevant.

2) The issue is not targeting, the issue is exclusion. If the ads are targeting based on age then only members of a certain age group see the ads. This also means anyone outside that group does not see the ads which means they were excluded based on their age. Combined with the ad content being a job this is illegal discrimination based on age.

3) The specific nature of the algorithm is irrelevant to the effect.

So not sure how you can really prove discrimination.

"The platform offered them a set of checkboxes, some of which let them do things which are illegal to do in an ad. They clicked the checkboxes that do the illegal things."

That's how you prove it.

> It's anecdata, but if I ask my teen daughter, Facebook is for older people, and the kids are all using things that I've never even heard of. So not sure how you can really prove discrimination

Aren't they looking for young professionals (twenty-somethings)? Whatever teenagers are using right now will only become relevant to this debate in a few years, when they'll be the ones targeted by those companies*

[*] I'm too cynical to believe they'll be out of business by then.

Irrelevant, this is an article about discrimination on Facebook.

For those wondering, the new cool things are snapchat and instagram.

Quote: The promotion was set to run on the Facebook feeds of users 25 to 36.

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