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Facebook Sued by Housing Advocates Alleging Discrimination

Facebook still allows for discriminatory housing advertisements despite past promises to remove tools that allow landlords and brokers to exclude certain groups of people from seeing their listings, a new lawsuit claims.

The lawsuit alleges that the social media giant gives housing advertisers the option to "exclude families with children and women from receiving advertisements, as well as users with interests based on disability and national origin, NBC News reported.

Then Facebook approves and permits advertisers to publish these ads in a discriminatory manner without consumers ever knowing they have been excluded."

The suit, filed Tuesday in federal court in New York City, comes more than a year after ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative news organization, revealed that advertisers could use Facebook to target housing ads so they were seen by only white people — a violation of federal fair housing rules.

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