Facebook’s Orwellian advertising practices were back in the news this week when the mother of a stillborn child found herself bombarded with advertisements for happy healthy babies, reminding her every moment of her loss. As other users chimed in with similar experiences, including how the loss of a pet or a parent doesn’t stop one from being bombarded with advertisements or seeing them included in Facebook’s “year in review” videos, it raises the question of why a company that can tell that we’re pregnant, sometimes before even we know, can’t figure out when we’ve experienced loss. Could it be that the answer is that pregnancy sells ads, but death isn’t monetizable and thus not worth Facebook focusing on?
Death is the inevitable consequence of life and all social media users will grapple at some point with loss, whether of a parent, child, spouse, pet, loved one, friend, neighbor, classmate or someone that made an impact on them. In a world in which our interactions with others are increasingly mediated by social media, we frequently turn to social platforms like Facebook and Twitter to communicate news about our lives and to be congratulated and consoled on life’s events.
Ad-supported platforms like Facebook have built immense data empires that mine our every comment and action to discern the latest updates in our lives. Algorithms silently scour the content we consume, the things we say, how we interact with others and the things they say to us to build rich profiles of our realtime interests and life events.
Pregnancy has been a longstanding focus of advertisers since long before the digital era. The rise of massive data-driven profiling, however, has made it possible for companies today to determine that an individual is pregnant even before they themselves or their immediate family may be aware. The reason for this is that pregnancy represents an immensely monetizable life event that can cause a user to make wholesale changes to even their most loyal purchasing behaviors. The earlier that an advertiser can target a pregnant individual, the greater chance they have of swaying them to try their product.
It is no surprise then that companies like Facebook spend extraordinary effort to determine which of their two billion users are likely to be pregnant even if they themselves have not explicitly broadcast this information publicly.
The problem is that when a pregnancy or child is lost, the cold hard calculus of capitalism holds that death is not a major long-term monetizable event. Other than an initial set of purchases relating to funeral and other costs, a death does not signify a major increase or positive shift in purchasing behaviors of the individuals suffering the loss.
In short, a new parent will be rapidly ramping up their purchasing and likely changing many of their product loyalties, making them extremely valuable to advertisers. A parent that has just lost their child will not undergo a major long-term increase in purchasing and thus is of no special interest to advertisers.
It is simply not worth it to companies like Facebook to invest massive amounts of effort in building algorithms that detect life events that aren’t monetizable. Flagging that someone has just endured a non-monetizable life event genuinely has no interest or importance to Facebook, it can’t turn that information into profit of any kind.
While bombarding a grieving parent with ads for happy children will cause that user indescribable pain, it is important to remember that Facebook will actually earn a profit on all of that suffering. Much as the company profits monetarily from terrorism propaganda and recruiting, human trafficking, genocide, hate speech, sexism, racism and all other forms of horrific speech, so too does it earn money while hammering home to a parent that their child is gone.
Why build a filter to automatically detect a user who has suffered a loss when that filter would reduce Facebook’s revenue stream?
Facebook’s vice president of advertising suggested that grieving parents navigate through screen after screen of advanced settings until they find the site’s advertising preferences pages and then wade through the settings until they find a special section that allows users to hide advertisements about alcohol, parenting and pets, with an option to suggest other topics. Though, even here the company clarifies that “You may still see ads related to this topic, but we’ll use your input to improve the ads you see,” meaning there really is no way to fully escape them.
It is simply unimaginable that at the close of 2018 Facebook’s only solution for parents who have suffered loss is in their darkest hour to wade through a series of menus hunting for a buried configuration page to manually turn off some amount of parenting ads. If Facebook’s algorithms can deduce that they are pregnant and start sending them parenting ads without them ever consenting to them, why should the company force them to wade through menus to turn those ads off? As many of the parents noted, their Facebook pages are typically awash with sympathetic messages filled with keywords relating to death and their Facebook behavior typically represents a sharp and massive change of the kind Facebook brags in its research papers and advertising materials that its algorithms are purpose-built to detect.
It is also noteworthy that Facebook can recognize when we add a pet to our family, but not when it passes away. Nor apparently can it detect when we are trying to avoid alcohol.
The company did not respond to a request for comment on why in nearly a decade and a half the company has not adequately invested in automatically detecting loss and adjusting users’ advertising accordingly. Given the incredible pain this filtering failure can cause, it is remarkable that Facebook has apparently done so little to address it. In particular, for a company that regularly boasts of the immense almost human-like capabilities of its vaunted AI systems, the fact that it can’t pick up on an avid pregnant user who abruptly disappears for several days, followed by hundreds of messages of condolences about a stillborn baby, shows just how little the company has invested in this area.
Putting this all together, in the end, the real answer comes down to money. Positive life events like pregnancy or adding a new pet to the family result in increases and changes in spending behavior that are of great interest to advertisers and thus directly monetizable. Death is not as valuable to advertisers and thus not as monetizable. For a company driven by profit, monetizable behaviors are worth pouring engineering resources into new ways of discovering them, while non-monetizable behaviors may cause immense pain to users, but aren’t worth Facebook focusing on because they don’t drive revenue. In fact, by bombarding suffering users with ads and making their pain much worse, the company actually earns a profit from their pain. In the end, if it doesn’t turn a profit or risk government intervention, social media companies aren’t likely to spend a dime worrying about it.
