Segmentation is a common characteristic of online advertising campaigns. A sophisticated advertiser never shows the same types of ads to young and old audiences (especially on Facebook) because the two audiences react drastically different. If your goal is to run efficient campaigns, you will always separate the two.
As a result, the advertiser can simply claim that they separated the two, and then realized they simply couldn't afford the CPC of the older audience (i.e. the ROI didn't make sense). Alternatively, they could just set a very high bid for the older audience and never get any traffic to those segments.
Overall, I think you'd be hard pressed to prove discriminatory intent even if it exists.
Someone quoted in the article does make the case that the federal age employment law does allow for other considerations to a "reasonable" degree when targeting age -- i.e. discrimination isn't as cut-and-dry as it would be for targeting race or gender:
> But some companies contend that there are permissible reasons to filter audiences by age, as with an ad for entry-level analyst positions at Goldman Sachs that was distributed to people 18 to 64. A Goldman Sachs spokesman, Andrew Williams, said showing it to people above that age range would have wasted money: roughly 25 percent of those who typically click on the firm’s untargeted ads are 65 or older, but people that age almost never apply for the analyst job...
> Pauline Kim, a professor of employment law at Washington University in St. Louis, said the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, unlike the federal anti-discrimination statute that covers race and gender, allows an employer to take into account “reasonable factors” that may be highly correlated with the protected characteristic, such as cost, as long as they don’t rely on the characteristic explicitly.
Segmentation is a common characteristic of online advertising campaigns. A sophisticated advertiser never shows the same types of ads to young and old audiences (especially on Facebook) because the two audiences react drastically different. If your goal is to run efficient campaigns, you will always separate the two.
As a result, the advertiser can simply claim that they separated the two, and then realized they simply couldn't afford the CPC of the older audience (i.e. the ROI didn't make sense). Alternatively, they could just set a very high bid for the older audience and never get any traffic to those segments.
Overall, I think you'd be hard pressed to prove discriminatory intent even if it exists.