Sure. FB knows your ethnicity. In violation of US federal law, this information is used to show you different apartment ads. This makes it harder for black people to live in integrated communities.
Similar things happen with jobs and ethnicity, jobs and gender, with jobs and age discrimination, etc.
FB does enforce the fair housing act and other laws. The platform is actually quite strict nowadays and catches lots of innocent ads in their filters for protected categories. Ad platforms should follow the law, that's working as planned.
FB may do so now but that's only because of lawsuits as recently as 2019. It wasn't something they volunteered to do.
But you asked how targeted ads hurt people, and I showed a fairly recent example. Something that wouldn't exist without targeted advertising. How does that not prove my point?
Its not like FB has ever let advertisers "exclude black people" before. The critics said it may be possible that protected categories get less ads for housing, employment, etc due to algorithmic bias. That is a subtle danger, and honestly hard to technically implement at scale, but I think FB has always given a good faith effort in this area.
No, you have never been able to target by race. NY times is referring to algorithmic targeting that incidentally correlated to race, which FB cleaned up in 2019.
There is no difference between "filter out black people" and "filter out X, (X correlates 99% with black people)". And I mean that legally, morally and practically.
But, you seem to be shifting the goalposts pretty significantly. So, do you agree with the base point that targeted ads can produce pretty bad results?
Similar things happen with jobs and ethnicity, jobs and gender, with jobs and age discrimination, etc.