Leak bares Facebook’s advertising policies

A leak from Facebook's Australian office yesterday provides a glimpse into the social network's secretive advertising practices.

A 23-page document discovered by The Australian, reveals how Facebook executives promoted advertising campaigns that exploit Facebook users' emotional states - including some as young as 14 years old.

According to the report, the selling point of this 2017 document was that Facebook's algorithms could determine, and allow advertisers to pinpoint, "moments when young people need a confidence boost."

Elaborating on the issue the document offered a litany of teen emotional states that the company claimed it could estimate based on how teens used the service, including "worthless", "insecure", "defeated", "anxious", "silly",  "useless",  "stupid", "overwhelmed", "stressed" and "a failure."

According to The Australian, the documents also revealed a particular interest in helping advertisers target moments in which young users were interested in "looking good and body confidence'' or ''working out and losing weight."

Another section described how image-recognition tools were used on both Facebook and Instagram (a wholly-owned Facebook subsidiary) to reveal to advertisers "how people visually represent moments such as meal times."

Also, it went into great detail about how younger Facebook users expressed themselves - according to Facebook Australia, earlier in the week, teens posted more about "anticipatory emotions" and "building confidence," while weekend teen posts contained more "reflective emotions" and "achievement broadcasting."

Facebook denied it was targeting insecure young people in order to push advertising.

Even as it confirmed that the research was shared with advertisers, Facebook said the article was ''misleading''.

"Facebook does not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state,'' the network said.

"The analysis done by an Australian researcher was intended to help marketers understand how people express themselves on Facebook.

"It was never used to target ads and was based on data that was anonymous and aggregated.

"Facebook has an established process to review the research we perform. This research did not follow that process, and we are reviewing the details to correct the oversight."