Emotional Targeting and Teens

Here are four of the most powerful and disturbing pull quotes from chapter 44

1. “Facebook is offering advertisers the opportunity to target 13 to 17 year olds across its platforms, including Instagram, during moments of psychological vulnerability, when they feel worthless, insecure, stressed, defeated, anxious, stupid, useless, and like a failure.”
2. “Facebook does work for a beauty product company, tracking when 13 to 17-year-old girls delete selfies, so it can serve a beauty ad to them at that moment. We don’t know what happens to young teen girls when they’re targeted with beauty advertisements after deleting a selfie. Nothing good.”
3. “Years later, I would learn that British teenager Molly Russell had saved Instagram posts, including one from an account called ‘feeling worthless’ before committing suicide. ‘Worthless,’ being one of the targeting fields.”
4. “One of the top ad executives for Australia calls me late one night to complain. ‘Why are we putting out statements like this?’ he wants to know. ‘This is the business, Sarah. We’re proud of this. We shout this from the rooftops. This is what puts money in all our pockets.’”

Each of these highlights the deeply troubling nature of Facebook’s practices.

Full text —

Careless People: Sarah Wynn-Williams

Chapter 44 — Emotional Targeting

In April 2017, a confidential document is leaked that reveals Facebook is offering advertisers the opportunity to target 13 to 17 year olds across its platforms, including Instagram, during moments of psychological vulnerability, when they feel worthless, insecure, stressed, defeated, anxious, stupid, useless, and like a failure, or to target them when they’re worried about their bodies and thinking of losing weight, basically, when a teen is in a fragile, emotional state.

Facebook’s advertising team had made this presentation for an Australian client that explains the Instagram and Facebook monitor teenagers’ posts, photos, interactions, conversations with friends, visual communications, and Internet activity on and off Facebook’s platforms and use this data to target young people when they’re vulnerable. In addition to the moments of vulnerability listed, Facebook finds moments when teenagers are concerned with body confidence and working out and losing weight. At first blush, it sounds pretty gross, sifting through teens’ private information to identify times when they might be feeling worthless and vulnerable to an advertiser flogging flat tummy tea or whatever other rubbish. But apparently, Facebook’s proud of it.

They’ve placed a story in Australia, explaining how the company uses targeting based on emotions. How brands can tap into Aussie and Kiwis’ emotions. Facebook research, which touts how Facebook and Instagram use the emotional drivers of behavior to allow advertisers to form a connection. The advertising industry understands that we buy more stuff when we are insecure, and it’s seen as an asset that Facebook knows when that is and can target ads when we’re in the state. A reporter for an Australian newspaper gets his hands on one of the internal documents about how Facebook actually does this.

And he reaches out for a comment from Facebook before publishing. That’s when I hear about it. I didn’t know anything about this, and neither did the policy team in Australia.

It’s an advertising thing. I put on our response team of communication specialists, members from the privacy team and measurement team and safety policy specialists that are supposed to figure out what to say publicly. No one in that group, other than me and my Australian team, seems surprised that Facebook made an advertising deck like this.

One person messages the group. “I have a very strong feeling that the Australian staffer who prepared the deck is not the only researcher doing this work. So do we want to open a giant can of worms or not?”

And they’re right. At first we think the leaked document is one Facebook made to pitch a gum manufacturer to target teenagers during vulnerable emotional states. Then, eventually, the team realizes, no.

The one that got leaked was for a bank. There are obviously many decks like this. The privacy staffer explains that teams do this type of customized work targeting insecurities for other advertisers, and there are presentations for other clients, specifically targeting teens.

We discuss the possibility that this news might lead to investigations by state attorneys general or the Federal Trade Commission, because it might become public that Facebook commercializes and exploits Facebook’s youngest users. 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. A statement is quickly drafted, and the response team debates whether Facebook can include the line, “We take this very seriously and are taking every effort to remedy the situation.” Since in fact, this is apparently just normal business practice.

A comms staffer points out what should be obvious: that we can’t say we’re taking efforts to remedy it if we’re not. This prompts other team members to confirm his take, revealing other examples they know of. Facebook targets young mothers based on their emotional states and targets racial and ethnic groups, for example, Hispanic and African-American “feeling fantastic” over index.

Facebook does work for a beauty product company, tracking when 13 to 17-year-old girls delete selfies, so it can serve a beauty ad to them at that moment. We don’t know what happens to young teen girls when they’re targeted with beauty advertisements after deleting a selfie. Nothing good.

There’s a reason why you erase something from existence, why it feels that it can’t be shed, and surely Facebook shouldn’t then be using that moment to bombard them with extreme weight loss ads or beauty industry ads, or whatever else they push on teens feeling vulnerable. The weird thing is that the rest of our Facebook coworkers seem unbothered about this. My team and I are horrified.

One of them messages me, also wondering about asking my apparently morally bankrupt colleagues if they are aware of any more. The Facebook advertising guy who is cited in the Australian article has three children. “I took them through as a kid being bullied. What was he thinking?”

I’m still struggling to get a better picture of what we’re dealing with here. So I ask for an independent audit by a third party to understand everything that Facebook has done like this around the world targeting vulnerable people, so I can try to stop it.

Who has this information and how many advertisers has it been shared with? The team is not enthusiastic. Elliot nixes any audit, and cautions against using the word “audit” at all, even as an ask like mine, saying that lawyers have discouraged that description in similar contexts.

He doesn’t say why, but I’m guessing he doesn’t want to create a paper trail, a report with damning details that could be leaked or subpoenaed. Years later, I would learn that British teenager Molly Russell had saved Instagram posts, including one from an account called “feeling worthless” before committing suicide. Worthless, being one of the targeting fields.

This only emerged due to a lawsuit that revealed internal documents, acknowledging a palpable risk of similar incidents. The initial statement Facebook gives the Australian journalist who discovered the targeting and surveillance back in 2017 does not acknowledge that this sort of ad targeting is commonplace at Facebook. In fact, it pretends the opposite.

“We have opened an investigation to understand the process failure and improve our oversight. We will undertake disciplinary and other processes as appropriate.”

A junior researcher in Australia is fired, even though that poor researcher was most likely just doing what her bosses wanted. She’s just another nameless young woman who was treated as cannon fodder by the company.

One of the top ad executives for Australia calls me late one night to complain. “Why are we putting out statements like this?” he wants to know. “This is the business, Sarah. We’re proud of this. We shout this from the rooftops.”

“This is what puts money in all our pockets. And these statements make it look like it’s something nefarious. It looks bad in front of our advertisers,” he says, “for Facebook to pretend it’s not doing this targeting.”

“We’re pretending we don’t do this?” he asks. “And 13 to 17-year-olds? That’s a very important audience. Advertisers really want to reach them and we have them.”

On an earnings call just three days after Facebook’s false denial, Cheryl touts Facebook’s ability to target based on sex and age, stating, “We think that targeting and measurement are significant competitive advantages for us. Just basic targeting itself, just age and gender, we are 38% more accurate than broad-based targeting, according to Nielsen, in the US. And that’s just age and gender.”

I know I’m on vacation and I have a valid excuse to stay out of this, to not put any grit in the machine, or damage my standing with leadership. I know anything I do or say at this point will not change the choices leadership is making. I know it’s in my best interest to just stay silent, to not sabotage myself. But then, before I can think too hard about it, I’m confronting Elliot, relaying the call I had from the ad executive, and my own concerns that we’re lying to the public more angrily than I mean to.

“Why?” I asked Elliot, “can’t we just stop targeting depressed teenagers and anyone else in a vulnerable emotional state? We’ll still make a lot of money. It can’t be that much of our business.”

Elliot’s amused. “If you and he both hate this for opposite reasons, we must have gotten this exactly right.”