Facebook Allegedly Targeted Teen Girls With Beauty Ads After They Deleted Selfies

It used to be that if you didn’t like your selfie, you deleted it, and that was the end of it. 

Today, with algorithmic advertising and surveillance on the rise, even your deleted photos can influence your social media feed. Unfortunately for us, they can even be monetized.

As reported by Futurism, according to former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams, who worked at the company from 2011 to 2017, Facebook was allegedly monitoring when teen girls deleted selfies – and using that behavior as a prompt to serve them beauty ads. Not because they’d expressed interest in a product or liked the post but because the act of deletion alone flagged them as vulnerable and, therefore, more easily influenced. Companies are profiting off of women's and girls’ insecurities.

New mothers were also allegedly targeted based on their moods. Emotional states were treated like consumer segments. If someone felt fantastic, there were ads for that. If they didn’t, there were ads for that, too. “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.

Back in 2017, The Australian reported that Facebook had created a pitch deck bragging to advertisers that it could target users – specifically young ones – at moments when they felt “worthless,” “insecure,” “stressed,” “defeated,” “anxious,” “stupid,” “useless,” or “like a failure.”

Facebook denied the claims at the time, stating, “Facebook does not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state.” They described the internal research as a way to help marketers “understand how people express themselves on Facebook,” insisting the data was “anonymous and aggregated.”

Yet, Wynn-Williams says that behind the scenes, it was business as usual. She claims that executives were unbothered by the ethical concerns. One top ad exec allegedly told her, “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.”

The details are chilling but not at all shocking – this is how the surveillance economy works. Everything you do (or don’t do) on social media teaches the algorithm what you consume, and that data is sold to companies. In 2022, the data trade generated over $274 billion in revenue. By 2030, it's projected to reach nearly $700 billion. 

Four key categories feed this system: your personal details (like age and gender), your interests (the things you like and share), your off-app behavior (what you do after you leave the platform), and your psychographics (your values, habits, and mental state as inferred from your digital footprint).

Even when internal alarms were raised, Wynn-Williams says Facebook kept pushing ahead. A junior researcher was allegedly fired over the 2017 controversy, “even though that poor researcher was most likely just doing what her bosses wanted… another nameless young woman who was treated as cannon fodder.”

And according to Wynn-Williams, the company didn’t stop there. “Not only does Facebook offer this type of customized behavioral targeting,” a deputy chief privacy officer allegedly told her, “but there’s a product team working on a tool that would allow advertisers to do this themselves, without Facebook’s help.”

Meta has taken legal action against Careless People, forcing Wynn-Williams to stop promoting the book. 

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