You can't conflate issues here. There are two major questions in play: 1) Is it unlawful for the advertiser to publish advertisements that may result in an ind

You can't conflate issues here. There are two major questions in play: 1) Is it unlawful for the advertiser to publish advertisements that may result in an individual selectively advertising? There seems to be no law or guidance even suggesting that the answer is yes here. For instance, under your guidance the billboard owner (who then rents it to the advertiser) would not be liable for not ensuring that the advertiser was advertising in a sufficiently broad, or random, variety of locations to fulfill the legal regulations. Facebook in this case is not the person placing the advertisements - but the venue of advertisement. 2) Is it unlawful for a person to advertise without complete demographic representation? This is not what this case is about, though it's an interesting question. The HUD's guidance makes this quite clear though, like you mention, that is guidance from the HUD and not necessarily the law itself. Government agencies tend to take very broad positions on laws, but these interpretations do not always hold up in the courts. It would be interesting to see how this point is argued from both sides, though this is a tangential issue. This case is quite peculiar though since the HUD release seems to be building a case based on #2, yet targeting a defendant was would be implied from #1. This seems highly inconsistent, so again - it should be very interesting to see how this case develops.