The BBC wrote yesterday about a 12-year-old girl who, having just joined Instagram, was bombarded with advertisements for health and beauty products, despite actually be interested in athletic and academic pursuits. As society is becoming more aware of the dangers of sexist stereotypes and the immense harm such imagery can have on body image and body confidence, it raises the question of whether social platforms should be required to do more to cull ads that promote harmful stereotypes.
Social media platforms have become hotbeds of racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and every other imaginable horrific kind of speech. Armies of content moderators patrol their walled gardens deleting harmful material. Yet most of the public debate over social media’s toxic underbelly have focused on user-contributed content, not the advertising that saturates our social environs.
In a society that is increasingly aware of the immense harm toxic stereotypes can have on mental health and emotional well-being, what happens when social media platforms reinforce these stereotypes?
What happens when young girls are bombarded every second of every day with advertisements encouraging them to focus on fashion and makeup and emphasizing their physical appearance, while boys are shown ads encouraging sports and engineering and business pursuits?
What happens when those young girls see nothing but imagery of airbrushed impossibly perfect models featured in ads telling them how imperfect they are and how much they need to focus on their appearance to succeed in life?
What happens when those young boys are shown endless imagery of athletes, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, engineers, political leaders and CEOs and encouraged to focus on careers, accomplishments and monetary success?
What happens when young women see ads for cheerleader and fashion camp and are barraged with coupons for makeup and clothes, while young men see ads for sports, engineering and business camp and are barraged with coupons for books, chemistry and electronic sets, and software development courses?
What does it do to our emotional well-being to be placed into a box based on our gender and kept there, saturated with endless advertisements 24 hours a day that reinforce where society believes we belong and the interests, roles and lives we should be living?
What happens to LGBTQ individuals when algorithms relentlessly saturate them with the lifestyle of a different gender or orientation they don’t identify with?
Modern digital advertisements on platforms like Instagram and its parent Facebook are targeted to the interests and behaviors of each individual user.
Bombarding a young woman with advertisements for makeup and fashion if she has shown an interest in those products in the past or a young man with advertisements for business and engineering courses might seem to be advertising at its best, focusing on providing individuals precisely what they want.
If a young woman has shown an interest in makeup or a man an interest in engineering, why should Instagram waste advertisers’ money showing engineering ads to the woman or makeup ads to the man?
The answer is that society is increasingly realizing that certain targeted advertising can be harmful and that we may have interests we have not publicly exposed in ways algorithms are aware of. A young girl who is interested in engineering, but never sees the advertisements for engineering-related activities and pursuits that saturate her male peers will be at a considerable disadvantage, which in turn would lead algorithms to reinforce their sexist stereotypes of what her interests should be. Internships, summer camps and interest clubs will all be invisible to her even as her male peers are encouraged several times a day to apply.
Asked how Instagram would respond to the concern that some kinds of targeted advertising can contribute to harmful stereotypes and be damaging to society as a whole and whether the company felt any responsibility to address such stereotypes being perpetuated through its advertising business, the company did not respond.
Given that advertising comprises the majority of parent company Facebook’s revenue, it is unsurprising that the same company that touts its efforts to police user content would steer clear of commenting on the ways in which its advertising business perpetuates harmful stereotypes.
After all, it is those harmful stereotypes that generate the revenue that keeps it in business.
Social media companies have little incentive to do better when it comes to their advertising businesses because ultimately, they profit handsomely from hate speech, terrorism, threats of violence, human trafficking and harmful stereotypes. All of this content generates revenue for Silicon Valley.
In the end, the simple fact is that Instagram profits monetarily from harmful stereotypes and until society forces the company to place the good of society over its own short-term profits, there is simply no reason for it to change.
