San Francisco, June 22 (TIWN) Meta (formerly Facebook) has agreed to settle a lawsuit with the US government that accused the social network of engaging in discriminatory advertising for housing on its platform.

The housing discrimination lawsuit, filed by the government in 2019, accused that Meta enabled and encouraged advertisers to target their housing ads by relying on race, colour, religion, sex, disability, familial status, and national origin to decide which Facebook users will be eligible, and ineligible, to receive housing ads.     Under the settlement, Meta will stop using an advertising tool for housing ads which relies on a discriminatory algorithm to find users who "look like" other users based on Fair Housing Act (FHA)-protected characteristics.  Meta also will develop a new system over the next six months to address racial and other disparities caused by its use of personalisation algorithms in its ad delivery system for housing ads, the US Department of Justice said in a statement late on Tuesday.