Facebook Gets Backlash for Segmenting Audience of “Emotionally Vulnerable” Youths

Today it was revealed that Facebook has been identifying “emotionally vulnerable” youths on their platform, segmenting them into an audience, and allowing advertisers to target this audience with their content. The backlash was immediate.

A spokesman for Facebook responded with this statement: "Facebook does not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state. The analysis done by an Australian researcher was intended to help marketers understand how people express themselves on Facebook.”

But regardless, this data was mined for children as young as 14, which is the legal cut off for a minor in Australia (where this report originated), and marketing research of minors is prohibited.

This obviously ruffled some feathers In Australia and here in America. And although it’s claimed that this data was not used to target young audiences with actual ads, it raises a lot of the questions surrounding data-driven ad targeting. This is obviously a particularly sensitive area to gather data without permission – but what would the negative be, exactly?

Hypothetically, let’s say a 14 year old is suffering from a bout of depression, and makes a post with keywords that trigger this acknowledgement in Facebook. An ad starts popping up in their feed, promoting one of those new apps that connects you with a licensed therapist. The kid uses the app, and gets better. Who exactly is the bad guy here?

Beyond targeting ads, gathering this variety of data can have infinite uses. Gathering this data could also help therapists put the known symptoms of depression into a cultural context – how it relates to trends and, more importantly, how these symptoms relate to, and reveal themselves in, social media platforms. This has a lot of potential for preventative mental health care.

It’s understandable to not want a soulless entity like Facebook or Google to know when you’re depressed. But that’s a knee-jerk reaction to having our vulnerabilities exposed. If we remove the stigma of depression and other mental health issues, there’s little reason left to willfully ignore the next frontier in preventative, contextualized and personalized mental healthcare.