A class action lawsuit alleging Facebook allowed discriminatory ad practices on its platform can move forward after the Supreme Court decided it won’t hear the company’s challenge to authorize the case.

The suit was first launched in 2019 by Lyse Beaulieu, a Quebec woman who claims she was not shown ads for jobs due to age-related targeting controls available to advertisers. Beaulieu was between the ages of 63 and 65 during the time of her job search.

In 2021, the Quebec Superior Court refused to approve the class action, as it said the proposed class – all Facebook users located in Quebec who “have been explicitly excluded by Facebook’s ad services” because of their race, sex, marital status, age, origin or social situation since April 11, 2016 – was too broad. At the end of 2022, an appeal court reversed the decision, ruling that the number of users who could be part of the lawsuit was not a valid reason to refuse authorization.

Facebook took the matter to the Supreme Court, which made its ruling on Thursday afternoon. Parent company Meta has not yet commented on the case.

The kind of targeting capabilities that the case centres around are no longer available on the social media platform. In 2020, Facebook introduced new rules that prevented advertisers from using age, gender or postal codes to target ads for jobs, housing or credit services. That came after complaints and reporting, both in Canada and the U.S., about how advertisers could use targeting controls to discriminate against potential applicants.