Federal departments running targeted Facebook ads may have broken law

A number of federal government departments may accept infringed on Canadian human rights law by running age-restricted targeted ads on Facebook, according to the CBC.

The departments in question include the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), the Correctional Service of Canada and the RCMP.

Bourgeois MP Peter Kent told the CBC that the federal departments should not exclude Canadians from seeing chore opportunities.

"It is fundamentally confronting the law. The government has to explain itself now, those departments that placed those inappropriate micro-targeted ads on the ground of age and gender have to explain themselves," Kent told the CBC.

The House of Commons revealed documents that show that since March 2017, the CBSA ran four task ads on Facebook. Three of the ads were only visible to users between the ages of eighteen and 34.

Similarly, the Correctional Service of Canada ran xi ads on the platform since September 2018. All of the ads were visible to users between the ages of eighteen to 35, according to the documents.

The RCMP ran ads that were even more than targeted, every bit one of them was just visible to users who were eighteen to 24 years old.

Employers in Canada are not immune to restrict the visibility of chore ads based on age, gender, race, or organized religion, unless the brake is a job requirement.

On May 28th, Kevin Chan, caput of public policy for Facebook Canada, told the International Chiliad Committee in Ottawa that micro-targeting job ads infringes on Facebook's policies.

Patrick Borbey, the president of the Public Service Committee of Canada, released a statement regarding the use of social media for task posts.

"The public service needs to use modern recruitment methods to attract the workforce of the hereafter from across the land. Social media and other advertisement ways are central to achieving that goal, but should not replace the required publication on the GC Jobs website," the statement read.

The GC Jobs website is the Government of Canada'due south job board.

Source: CBC

Update 29/05/nineteen: The article was updated with a statement from the Public Service Commission of Canada.