This is beyond stupid. What they're saying is that even if you target people who write "I love programming" on their fb page, it's still discriminatory towards women because men are more likely to write those words.
The clear solution is for Facebook to find the people in the protected demographics and have them force joined into groups until they receive ads at a proper rate. If that isn't sufficient, Facebook can make posts on their behalf until they match with enough ads to bring everything back to parity.
Exactly, if I were going to put an ad for a babysitter, probably looking to get a highschooler who has some free time and needs some spending money, I'm not hoping the car mechanic who got laid off and is looking to pay rent gets to see that ad.
Likewise if I were to want help in taxidermying a cat, I'm not wanting the butcher or the baxter seeing the ad as well. I only want the taxidermist.
> What they're saying is that even if you target people who write "I love programming" on their fb page, it's still discriminatory
That is... not what they're saying. In fact the article doesn't claim to know the targetting mechanism at all (though it turns out that they found a way for some advertisements to circumvent the new restrictions on gender and race targetting). They're just claiming to have found ads that empirically are targetting demographics in ways that Facebook has already agreed not to.
The "I love programming" bit seems to be something you've invented.
"Dolese’s ad, for example, could have reached a predominantly male audience because it featured a man, or because an interest in trucking acts as a proxy for maleness, or both. (A Dolese spokeswoman said the ad targeted categories “that would appeal to someone in this line of work.”) The settlement did not resolve the potential bias from proxies and ad content, but said Facebook would study the issue."
The "I love programming" bit is an example of the kind of proxy they're talking about. Something correlated with gender but not gender itself. The FB algorithm uses thousands of data points that might correlate in different ways. Saying that any of those variables that correlates with gender should be forbidden is crazy.
> Saying that any of those variables that correlates with gender should be forbidden is crazy.
Once again, they are not saying that. You have applied a maximalist interpretation to the article that simply isn't present in the text.
The point of the article is that the end result is still discriminatory, something that Facebook had promised to fix. And they didn't fix it, and that's newsworthy.
Your point seems to be that solving the problem is really hard, so we shouldn't try to solve it, nor talk about whether or not it's being solved by parties who have promised to try to solve it?
Yeah but that's a self reinforcing feedback loop. Only showing programming ads to people that write "I love programming" is like only showing religious ads to people that write "I love God". The advertisements do not help outgroups break in and in fact may push them farther away.
To which the response is... So? Progressive social engineering is not the responsibility of advertisers or of Facebook. If I want to hire someone to do artwork for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign book I'm not going to place an ad in Guns 'N Ammo, despite how underrepresented that demographic is in the tabletop roleplaying industry.