Meta’s recent ads signal a rising societal problem

For women reading this article, how old were you when you received your first sexual advance from a man?

For men reading, ask any woman you know. Better yet, ask several of them. I bet their answers turn your stomach.

In late September, The Guardian reported that Meta used back-to-school photos of teenage girls to advertise the Threads app to fully grown men. Girls as young as 13. These photos were posted by regular moms on Facebook and Instagram, some of whom had their profiles set to private.

The photos of girls in their school uniforms appeared in-feed as advertisements resembling organic “suggested” threads posts, or were outright cross-posted without consent. Their faces weren’t hidden or blurred. In fact, some ads even bore the child’s real name.

According to one mother with fewer than 300 Instagram followers, the cross-posted photo of her 15-year-old daughter garnered almost 7,000 views, with 90% of them from nonfollowers. Also, 90% of the views came from men, half from men at least in their forties.

TRUST AND POLICIES

This reporting sent me reeling back into my memories of high school and earlier. Memories I’ve never re-examined or tried to make sense of as an adult. I talked it out with my best friend, and we were both taken aback by how common, how frequent this harassment was visited upon us and our peers.

I polled another friend, who grew up in a completely separate part of the country.

“Yep,” they said. “We lost at least one teacher every year to that kind of thing.”

Of course, a Meta spokesperson said the images didn’t violate their policies and blah blah blah. I and others have written extensively about Meta’s history of manipulating its users.

“I don’t know why they trust me, dumb fucks,” Zuckerberg wrote of the early Facebook users, while he was still at Harvard around 20 years ago.

I’ll note here that before Facebook, then-college sophomore Zuckerberg created a website called Facemash, where people could vote on the attractiveness of Harvard’s female students. He got the girls’ photos by hacking into the university’s official directories.

WHEN SOMEONE TELLS YOU WHO THEY ARE, BELIEVE THEM

Zuckerberg, like Elon Musk, hit the millionaire mark in his twenties. Sometimes I wonder if there’s some sort of arrested development thing happening here.

As Musk turns up the Nazi and porn dials on X and Zuckerberg rebrands himself as a jiu jitsu guy, it has never been clearer to me that we are all suffering a world in which morally stunted men wield immense power, often with a sneer.

Dumb fucks. That’s what they think when we trust them.

Even if they present themselves before Congress as mild, soft-spoken brainiacs, I don’t think they can’t be trusted to police themselves or remediate harmful aspects of their platforms. In my opinion, simple, common decency seems beyond their reach.

THE NEED FOR REGULATION

I desperately hope regulations take shape that curb the exploitation of our minds, bodies, and identities for the financial gain of any company. And in this specific case, it feels fairly minimal to me that it should illegal for companies like Meta to use our personal images, especially minors’, without explicit, informed consent. We need clear laws that prevent teen content from being served to adult audiences. Platforms should be required to prove how their algorithms target and amplify posts, and to give families real legal recourse when their children’s photos are repurposed as ad bait. Until we have that kind of accountability, these platforms will keep hiding behind their terms of service while building empires on our faces, our trust, and our kids.

As we wait and advocate for those regulations, I have to ask: At what point do these platforms become so flagrantly harmful, manipulative, and bot-bloated that we are compelled to divest our time and attention away from them?

Lindsey Witmer Collins is CEO of WLCM App Studio and CEO of Scribbly.

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