All for a buck, Facebook targeted the youth, the vulnerable, and the insecure with predatory advertising practices.
The allegation came about from The Australian, which received internal documents from the giant. Facebook can exploit the moods and insecurities of young adults using the platform, sentiment analysis, for the potential benefit of advertisers.
The secret report detailed just how Facebook goes about targeting by monitoring posts and interactions on the site. Facebook can determine when people as young as 14 feel “defeated,” “overwhelmed,” “stressed,” “anxious,” “nervous,” “stupid,” “silly,” “useless,” and a “failure.”
The system is called sentiment analysis, and the information gathered is made available to advertisers. Information such as if an individual is feeling worthless, overwhelmed, or nervous. The gathered data was then passed on to advertisers who could use the data to calculate their ad campaign.
While Google is the king of the online advertising world, Facebook is the other major player which dominates the industry worth about $80 billion last year.
Facebook can garner so much information about its users, all the way down to the emotional level, the enormous amount of tracking that takes place on the site is then used to target certain individuals for advertisements.
Previously Facebook had been caught running emotional experiments on its users, and now the giant has been found again running ad campaigns that specifically target those who are feeling blue and those who are young, all to earn a buck.
Related: Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter are teaming up to create database to shut down “certain content online”