A federal appeals court on Friday reinstated a lawsuit that charged Facebook Inc. with discriminating against minorities, the disabled and others in its housing ads, in a divided opinion.

Plaintiffs charged that because of Facebook’s targeting methods, women of color, single parents, persons with disabilities and others with protected attributes were prevented from having the same opportunity to view housing ads as others who were not in a protected class, according to the ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco in Rosemarie Vargas, et al. and Neuhtah Opiotennione; Jessica Tsai v. Facebook Inc.

As an example, the ruling said when Ms. Vargas, a disabled female of Hispanic descent, who is a single parent living in New York City, accessed Facebook Marketplace seeking Manhattan housing, she found no ads, yet a Caucasian friend using the same criteria received more ads for preferable housing. 

In dismissing the complaint, the 2-1 appellate panel’s opinion said the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, “faulted the complaint for not identifying specific ads” that Ms. Vargas did not see.

“But plaintiffs’ very claim is that Facebook’s practices concealed information from housing-seekers in protected classes. And nothing in the case law requires that a plaintiff identify specific ads that she could not see when she alleges that an ad-delivery algorithm restricted her access to housing ads in the first place.”

The ruling said the district court incorrectly held that Facebook has immunity from liability as a provider or user of an interactive computer service.

Plaintiffs “challenge Facebook’s conduct as a co-developer of content and not merely as a publisher of information provided by another information content provider,” it said.

The dissenting opinion said, “to survive a motion to dismiss plaintiff would have had to identify an ad that would otherwise have appeared that did not because the platform excluded their protected class.”

Plaintiff attorney Gerald V. Mantese of Mantese Honigman P.C. in Troy, Michigan, said in a statement, “We are pleased with the ruling and agree that Facebook is not a mere bulletin board posting the discriminatory housing ads of others. In fact, it created the discriminatory platform and then delivered the discriminatory selections.” 

Facebook’s attorneys did not respond to a request for comment.