Here’s the Twisted Way Facebook Reportedly Targeted Ads to Teenagers

A recent tell-all book written by Facebook’s former director of public policy reportedly claims that the tech giant detected when 13-year-old to 17-year-old girls deleted selfies and would show them beauty ads immediately after.

According to Futurism, Sarah Wynn-Williams’ book “Careless People” claimed that this type of monitoring first began in 2017 when Facebook, now known as Meta, was deriving ways to target teenagers on their platforms (via Futurism):

Though Facebook's ad algorithms are notoriously opaque, in 2017 The Australian alleged that the company had crafted a pitch deck for advertisers bragging that it could exploit "moments of psychological vulnerability" in its users by targeting terms like "worthless," "insecure," "stressed," "defeated," "anxious," "stupid," "useless," and "like a failure."

The social media company likewise tracked when adolescent girls deleted selfies, "so it can serve a beauty ad to them at that moment," according to Wynn-Williams. Other examples of Facebook's ad lechery are said to include the targeting of young mothers based on their emotional state, as well as emotional indexes mapped to racial groups, like a "Hispanic and African American Feeling Fantastic Over-index."

"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 reflects.

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Reportedly, Wynn-Williams explained that there was a product team working on a tool that would allow advertisers to target these ads themselves without Facebook’s help. 

Additionally, the company once claimed that “"Facebook does not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state” and called reports indicating otherwise “misleading.”

Last month, Wynn-Williams appeared in a Senate hearing about Meta. 

In the hearing, she stated, “I served as Director of Global Public Policy at Facebook, now Meta, for nearly seven years starting in 2011. Throughout those seven years, I saw Meta executives repeatedly undermine US national security and betray American values.” This surrounded the issues of free speech and involvement with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).