• “Like other major ad platforms, we enable targeting based on age and gender”

Because, you know, everyone discriminates based on age and gender so we do it too!

They also have features to target ads based on race and ethnicity. Which also means they enable advertisers to discriminate by race and ethnicity for say, things like housing or jobs. Facebook mostly hems and haws and says its a hard problem to solve.

Facebook can not prohibit racial, ethnic and gender discrimination automatically so they have instead created policies telling advertisers that discrimination is naughty so do not do that.

Source: US Congress