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Facebook may have to overhaul its entire ad-targeting system after a California court ruled last month that the platform's practice of routinely targeting ads by age, gender, and other protected categories violates a state anti-discrimination law.
The decision came after a 48-year-old Facebook user, Samantha Liapes, fought for years to prove that Facebook had discriminated against her as an older woman using the platform's ad-targeting system to shop for life insurance policies.
Liapes filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook in 2020. In her complaint, Liapes alleged that "Facebook requires all advertisers to choose the age and gender of its users who will receive ads, and companies offering insurance products routinely tell it to not send their ads to women or older people." Further, she alleged that Facebook’s ad-delivery algorithm magnifies the problem by using these required inputs to serve the ads to "lookalike audiences." Through its algorithm, Liapes alleged that she found that Facebook "discriminates against women and older people," by intentionally excluding them from seeing certain life insurance ads.
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