2021: "Facebook's internal research found its Instagram platform contributes to eating disorders and suicidal thoughts in teenage girls, whistleblower says"
(Whistleblower is correct.)
this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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Privacy
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Come on, it's only thoughts, not like actually jumping under a train... Who cares about teen's thoughts anyway.
Wait, so beauty ads were NOT being served to teen girls already?
if i had a cosmetic company, i would question the efficacy of this method. that's not how i would like to allocate my targeted advertising budget.
what if they deleted the pics because they were just changing phones? what if it was because they ran out of space? what if they were degoogling? what if it was because they're transforming?
there are other--more likely--scenarios why a person deletes their selfies than them reaching a nadir of self-loathing. i don't see this move converting into buying actions.
Well I guess it comes down to probability. How often does the average social media user delete their uploaded pictures because their phone storage is full? Or why would they delete those if they just got a new phone? If they are degoogling, why would they delete content on Facebook? (I know this one is pedantic, sorry). Also, transforming? What
Point being, chances a 14 year old insecure girl will delete pictures of her face off Facebook are like a hundred times more likely because she thinks she looks bad in them than for any of your odd reasons.
It comes down to ROI. Does spending money on advertising beauty products to teens who have deleted selfies lead to more money in sales than spent on advertising? If so, capitalism says you should do it, it's free money.
And even if it doesn't, you as a marketing department should probably still try to convince upper management that the statistical noise is growth, otherwise less money for you. That's how weird marketing decisions happen, because large companies are extremely compartmentalized and upper management doesn't have time or resources to check how accurate that is, that's marketing's job.
i seem to have misunderstood. my reading was that they were tracking when selfies were being deleted from the user's device itself (and not off the facebook platform).
if the article is about selfies being deleted from the user's posts on meta platforms, otoh, i don't understand why there's a privacy brouhaha. surely their tos and privacy policy covers using your data and actions on their platforms for targeted advertising?
there is a conversation that needs to be had there about the morality of such a move, sure, but i don't see a privacy violation.
The more selfies one takes, the more one could delete. The more deleted selfies, the more likely the person is concerned with their personal appearances.
If I was a soulless corporation looking to exploit self confidence issues, this feels like a VERY good angle.
Why would they know or care if you delete something on your local phone? This is about if you deleted it from their platform, indicating shame and in their view, a potential customer.
Many young people use instagram as their camera app. By "detect when they delete their selfies", I'm assuming, that they were explicitly detecting when someone would take a selfie (noting it as selfie, of course), and then immediately deleting it after
possibly before they ever uploaded it as a post.
Edit: the article doesn't say anything about this though, in fact it only mentions "selfie" once other than the title.
lol that's terrible
They keep posting this slop like we don't already know. ToS never works. Libre software does.