Meta Whistlebower Sarah Wyliliams, former director of Facebook’s global public policy and author of the recently released Tell-All book, “The Careless People,” told the senator in testimony Wednesday that Meta actively targeted advertising based on emotional states.
This claim was first documented by Wynn-Williams in her book. Her book is about her time on Facebook and the ability of tech companies around the world to do harm, documenting “carelessness” from top executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former COO Sheryl Sandberg.
The focus of Wednesday’s hearing is primarily on dealings with China and it may have misrepresented the plan at previous Congressional hearings, but the senator also wanted to ask about Instagram, given that it was the subject of previous Congressional investigations into meta-harm to children in 2021.
In response to a question from Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Wynn-Williams admitted that Meta (known as Facebook at the time) targeted 13-17 year olds in ads when they were depressed or depressed.
“We can identify what they felt like no value, or helpless or failure, and (meta) will share that information with the advertisers,” Wynn Williams told senators on the Crime and Terrorism subcommittee within the Judiciary Committee. “Advertisers understand that when people don’t feel good about themselves, it’s often a good time to market their products. People are more likely to buy something.”
She said the company is letting advertisers know when teens are depressed at the best time to give ads. As an example, she suggested that if a teenage girl removes a selfie, advertisers might think it’s a good time to sell her beauty products, as she might feel bad about her appearance. They also targeted teens with weight loss ads when young girls were concerned about their physical self-confidence, Wynn Williams said.
She argued that Meta recognized users ages 13-17 as a vulnerable but “incredibly valuable” demographic for advertisers.
In fact, she said one business leader at the company explained to her that she knows Facebook has the “most valuable segment of the population” of advertisers, and that Meta should “trumpet it from the rooftop.”
At the time, Wynn-Williams was suggesting to executives that a trillion dollar company was not short on money and that there was no need to add a little more to this source to get on this route.
If Meta tries to target teens based on their emotional state, it makes sense to do the same for adults. And one document displayed during the hearing provided an example of exactly that, it turned out.
Facebook’s policy director asks in screenshots of an internal chat whether it is true that Facebook is studying emotional states with young mothers.
Adding a little more colour to her comments, Wynn-Williams also noted that Silicon Valley executives were surprised that their kids didn’t let their kids use the products they made.
“Yeah, has your teen ever used a new product we’re about to launch?” Wynn-Williams said. “And they said, ‘My teenagers are not allowed on Facebook. I don’t have teenagers on Instagram.” These executives do not allow this product to use products developed by Meta.
In a company statement, Meta denied the allegations of Wynn Williams’ testimony, calling him “divorced from reality and suffered from false claims.”
In response to his teen claims, Meta added:
“Parents know they are worried about teenagers having an unsafe or inappropriate experience online. That’s why they’re making major changes to the Instagram experiences of tens of millions of teenagers with new teenage accounts. These accounts provide built-in protection to automatically limit who and content teens are contacting them. Teens are blocking them from using the app for more than 15 minutes per day, or for a certain period of time, like at school or at night.”
The company also responded directly to a statement in 2017 about targeting people’s ads based on emotional state, saying the market analysis was “based on anonymously tallied data that has never been used to target ads.”
Updated after publication using additional statements from Meta.