The legal repercussion of Facebook’s actions and claims against theirs targeted job advertisements can be

amenable to be discriminatory acts under the provision of human rights legislation in Canada. In fact, it
has been stated that the unlawful discrimination against any job applicants is just as serious as that against
employees. Consequently, companies are mostly likely facing allegations from job applicants if they are
perceived as discriminatory in their recruitment and selection practices, which includes job
advertisements.

If a discriminatory job ad is published, parties can be held accountable for legal liability
including the person who advertises, people who helps to advertise the job if any, and finally the
person who publishes it, or in other words, owners of the job ads, recruitment agencies if
applicable and job posting platform agency, and in our cases specifically, Facebook and
employers.
Human Rights Code in Ontario and similar laws in other provinces makes it illegal to discriminate against
both employees and prospective employees based on prohibited grounds such as gender, race, or sexual
orientation, in which it also declares ban on factors considered as “announced intention to discriminate”
generating from the inclusion of words such as “strong physique needed” in the advertisement. On the
other hands, at federal level, the Canadian Human Rights Act also contains additional provision from
Section 10 suggesting that it is discriminatory for an employer “to enter into an agreement affecting
recruitment, referral, hiring, promotion, training, apprenticeship, transfer or any other matter relating to
employment or prospective employment…that deprives or tends to deprive an individual or class of
individuals of any employment opportunities on a prohibited ground of discrimination”. This seems to be
the proper description of the agreement Facebook and employers have in this case.
That’s being said, both Facebook and its clients - employers are potentially exposed to lawsuits and
corresponding legal and financial liability if these allegations are proved valid.
Was Facebook in the wrong?
The details prevailing in the article, in fact, give Facebook some grounds to rule out the claims
as their targeted ads can be, as cited, part of a larger recruitment campaigns which is
accessible to other demographic groups. Moreover, the tools used by ProPublica may not
thoroughly pick up all the ads running in the same time frame, details on the entire audience for
one ad are not always correctly reflected on these tools as well. However, for me personally,
Facebook does hold responsible once as a service provider, it must ensure that there’s little and
no room for discrimination to be facilitated through its platform. Additionally, the fact that these
tools provided to employers to target and discriminate against specific group of audiences are
provided and enabled by Facebook and also these potential discrimination acts do bring back a
large stream of income for the company make it even more liable both in legal and ethical
manner for such wrong doings.
Alternative actions

 Develop self-certification box on every job post, asking employers to self-evaluate and
affirm they meet legal compliances regarding equality and eliminate possible
discrimination content
 Creating job ads censoring and compliance board, implement human review if
necessary
 Right to cancel the services if employers continuously violate the set rules
  Modification on job ads delivery with new algorithms and approaches to make sure the
ads randomly and thorough reach all types of audiences

Signification

As Facebook is considered one of the largest social networks in the world, the pervasive impact of these
unlawful acts can be immensely significant putting into the context of its demographic population,
amount of information, daily reach and interactions. Not treating these issues seriously can turn an
initially friendly sharing platform into the incubation of extremely detrimental indirect or direct
discrimination against its own users and supporters.