Can Facebook target teens who feel “worthless”?

Facebook’s secretive advertising practices became a little more public on Monday thanks to a leak out of the company’s Australian office. This 23-page document discovered by The Australian (paywall), details in particular how Facebook executives promote advertising campaigns that exploit Facebook users’ emotional states—and how these are aimed at users as young as 14 years old.

According to the report, the selling point of this 2017 document is that Facebook’s algorithms can determine, and allow advertisers to pinpoint, “moments when young people need a confidence boost.” If that phrase isn’t clear enough, Facebook’s document offers a litany of teen emotional states that the company claims it can estimate based on how teens use the service, including “worthless,” “insecure,” “defeated,” “anxious,” “silly,” “useless,” “stupid,” “overwhelmed,” “stressed,” and “a failure.”

Source: Report: Facebook helped advertisers target teens who feel “worthless” [Updated] | Ars Technica

Apparently, they was a researcher working with Facebook data to find out how people express themselves on Facebook. The original report said ads were targeted, but the update from Facebook makes it a little less murky. Still, pretty scary, but I’ve talked about this before.