As I’ve written before, social media is the Big Tobacco of the 21st century. This is an entire industry whose internal research has for years made clear to them just how harmful their products are, especially to children. Like Big Tobacco in the 1950s, they not only try to hide the evidence and silence whistleblowers, they double down on marketing their poison to children.
Now we learn that, in a move akin to Philip Morris hawking cancer treatments, social media giant Meta is targeting especially vulnerable children with mental health ads.
Facebook owner Meta is “kicking kids when they’re down”, targeting vulnerable teenagers with a barrage of advertisements based on their emotional state that ignites harm, including suicide, eating disorders and depression, a US Senate inquiry has heard.
The Australian originally revealed the tactics the $US1.48 trillion ($2.41 trillion) company used to monetise the mental health struggles of children as young as 13.
Whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams outlined further disturbing details of Meta’s strategy on Thursday morning before a US Senate Judiciary Committee.
Make no mistake, Zuckerberg wants Wynn-Williams, a former director of global public policy at Facebook, which rebranded itself Meta in 2021, silenced. She has been repeatedly threatened by Meta, including with a gag order and a threat of $50,000 fines every time she ‘disparages’ the company. I hope she’s making sure to look both ways before crossing the road.
“I have a lot of questions from Mark Zuckerberg. But he has proven time and time again that you cannot believe his answers. He’s lied to members of Congress, he’s lied to his employees, and he’s lied to Americans, and that’s why I’m asking this committee to hold them accountable,” Ms Wynn-Williams told Senate Judiciary Committee.
“This is not a company that looks after users, particularly those 13 to 17, which they regard as a vulnerable, yet very valuable.”
If you want to get an idea of just how harmful Meta execs know their products really are, just look to how they treat their own children.
What’s more, she said some of Meta’s own senior executives barred their children from using its products – swapping screens for wooden Montessori toys – because they knew how harmful their products were […]
“That was one of the things that shocked me when I moved to Silicon Valley. It’s a place full of wooden Montessori toys. Executives would always speak about how they have screen bans in the house. I would say, ‘Oh, has your team used the new product we’re about to launch?’ And they’re like, ‘My teenager’s not allowed on Facebook. I don’t have my teenager on Instagram.’
Which makes their usage of algorithms to target suffering children even more egregious.
Ms Wynn Williams said on early Thursday morning (Australian time) that Meta could identify when a child was “feeling worthless or helpless or like a failure”.
“They will take that information and share it with advertisers. One of the things about advertising is advertisers understand that when people don’t feel good about themselves, it’s often a good time to pitch a product, you know, people are more likely to buy something.
“And so what the company was doing was letting these advertisers know that these 13 to 17 year olds were feeling depressed and saying, now’s a really good time to serve them an advertisement. Or if a 13 year old girl would delete a selfie, that’s a really good time to try and sell her a beauty product.
“Things that often do concern teen girls, like body confidence, that’s something else that they use to target – weight loss, or other things on children really, 13 to 17 year olds.”
This is straight-up predatory behaviour. They know what they’re doing.
Not just to children, but to the entire country.
Ms Wynn-Williams […] alleged that the company also undermined national security.
This included briefing China on its artificial intelligence developments as early as 2015, giving Beijing the leg up to create its own low-cost model DeepSeek, as well as sharing American user data with the Communist Party and building censorship tools for the authoritarian regime […]
Senate Judiciary Committee chair Josh Hawley said Meta was “willing to give away American user data, but they were also trying to find out a way to make a buck on Americans, teenagers, children in times of distress”.
It’s long past time we started to decouple from these companies. When the product is ‘free’, you are the product – and so are your children.
Is this what you really want?
