Israeli class-action suit against Facebook targets job ads

• Author: ZEV STUB
• Published date: 03 October 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Israeli employment law, like that in most Western countries, states that a job advertisement cannot discriminate by age, gender, race, political beliefs or other variables. The law allows for anyone affected by such discrimination to be compensated for NIS 50,000, without proof of damage.

"Years ago that meant that a company couldn't write explicitly in a job ad that it was only looking for, say, white males aged 25-40," explained attorney Dr. Matan Gutman, who filed the case at the Tel Aviv Regional Labor Court. "But Facebook's ad system allows companies to discriminate in a more elegant way – by offering the options to target only certain types of people. That would be equivalent to a newspaper offering its clients the option to target only certain readers, which would clearly be prohibited. But Facebook publishes thousands of such job ads in Israel every year."

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In the United States and Canada, civil rights advocacy groups including the American Civil Liberties Union have filed similar class-action suits against Facebook in 2018 and 2019, charging that its platform allowed employers to target ads based on categories like race, national origin, age and gender. In both cases, a settlement was reached in which Facebook committed to two policy changes, Gutman said.

First, when users begin setting up a paid ad in Facebook's Ads Manager, they are prompted to say whether the ad relates to employment or other 'sensitive' categories. If answered in the affirmative, the platform will block the user from targeting viewers based on age, gender or race.

Second, the Facebook Ad Library, which allows users to search ads throughout the company's network, can be filtered by employment, so that such ads can be easily monitored.

These measures were only implemented in the US and Canada, where the suits were filed, and not in other countries with similar laws, Gutman noted, adding that Facebook reportedly also paid penalties of millions of dollars to the advocacy groups that filed the claims.

Gutman and his partner, Adv. Nir Friedman, have filed a...