This extends to many areas. Gun manufacturers aren't liable when someone goes on a shooting spree with a gun, for example.
I feel like this is a slippery slope. Facebook lets anyone advertise anything, and gives everyone the same targeting tools. If you use them illegally, that should be on you, not on Facebook. Just like how you can use a screwdriver to screw in screws, or to go around stabbing people with it. The difference is that screwdrivers are a well-understood tool, whereas ad targeting tools are new and scary.
If you want to make advertising illegal, I'm fine with that, but good luck.
Here it is the same thing with Facebook. If they sell you a platform for advertising, they might not be able to control 100% of the content of the ads, some bad stuff might slip. But they should NOT offer you tools to publish illegal ads. In that case, being able to filter ads by race is illegal, and it's on them to offer this option. It would be a different story if there was no option and a publisher just wrote "no people of <race>".
Just to be clear, we're talking about targeted advertising. I don't know how we can fix this issue. Maybe Facebook can ask tell type of an ad something is?
I don’t see why it’s Facebook’s responsibility to police advertising for housing and control how it’s targeted. If advertisers use illegal targeting then that should be on them.
Getting Facebook to disable some targeting option seems like a much easier route than going after each ad buyer. Targeting the publisher makes sense because they are in the best position to enforce policies on their platform and stop the descriminatory practice at a larger scale.
That sounds incredibly broad and impossible to to avoid.
In this case, just like Facebook.
Your responsibility, handed to you with the license, is to not do illegal things, even if people want to pay you money to do it. It's especially bad if you build an automated system that has options for people to do illegal things, since you are in charge of that. The FCC may or may not go after the people who bought the illegal-thing-service from you, but they will definitely go after you.
And the correct solution is to not have the options open in the first place. "Would you like to place an ad? Is it for real estate or housing in any way? OK, the following advertising options are open to you, but others have been turned off in order to comply with the law."