By India McCarty
A former Facebook employee claims the social media platform targeted teen girls with beauty ads after they deleted selfies.
“It could identify when they were feeling worthless or helpless or like a failure, and [Meta] would take that information and share it with advertisers,” Sarah Wynn-Williams said while testifying before U.S. Senators on the subcommittee for crime and terrorism.
She continued, “Advertisers understand that when people don’t feel good about themselves, it’s often a good time to pitch a product — people are more likely to buy something.”
Wynn-Williams added that the site also targeted young girls with weight loss ads if they determined a user was feeling insecure about their weight.
Teen girls weren’t the only ones being targeted; new mothers were allegedly targeted based on their moods.
“To me, this type of surveillance and monetization of young teens’ sense of worthlessness feels like a concrete step toward the dystopian future Facebook’s critics had long warned of,” Wynn-Williams wrote in her book, Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work.
Facebook released a statement refuting Wynn-Williams’ allegations, calling them “divorced from reality and riddled with false claims.”
“We know parents are worried about their teens having unsafe or inappropriate experiences online, which is why we’re making significant changes to the Instagram experience for tens of millions of teens with new Teen Accounts,” the platform continued. “We’re also giving parents more oversight over their teens’ use of Instagram, with ways to see who their teens are chatting with and block them from using the app beyond 15 minutes per day, or for certain periods of time, like during school or at night.”
Related: Meta Designed Platforms to Addict Kids, Court Document Claims
Facebook is also planning to take legal action against Wynn-Williams’ for the claims in her book.
This isn’t the first we’re hearing of Facebook’s targeted ads; in 2017, an internal report obtained by the Australian stated the company could monitor posts to see when users felt “stressed,” “defeated,” “overwhelmed,” “anxious,” “nervous,” “stupid,” “silly,” “useless” and like a “failure.”
Facebook initially apologized after the publication of this report, saying it would open an investigation into the executives who wrote it, but shortly after released another statement calling the Australian’s findings “misleading.”
“Facebook does not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state,” the statement read. “The analysis done by an Australian researcher was intended to help marketers understand how people express themselves on Facebook. It was never used to target ads and was based on data that was anonymous and aggregated.”
This latest bombshell revelation is just another reminder that social media sites know way more about us than we think.
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