Many women who have lost their babies are outraged by personalized pregnancy announcements on social media. Meta’s current rules risk breaking UK laws against direct marketing.
How big will my baby be at six weeks pregnant? What is the expected birth date? When should I schedule my first medical appointment?
These are some questions that women ask search engines when they find out they are pregnant.
With Sammi Claxon, it was no different. Soon after she started looking for answers, the algorithms detected that she was pregnant and started bombarding her with ads.
But when she lost her baby due to a miscarriagethe ads didn’t stop. After her first miscarriage in 2021, Sammi had four more over the following three years.
Feelings of shame and embarrassment left Sammi feeling isolated and turning to social media for support, but she remembers seeing her feed full of baby-related adverts, which was devastating for her.
Sammi, from Nottinghamshire, England, ended up moving away from social media to preserve her mental health.
Like Sammi, Tanya O’Carroll was impacted by targeted Facebook ads when she discovered she was pregnant in 2017.
“I thought this simply unnerving – this was before I even told people in my private life,” he told the BBC.
In March, after Tanya filed a lawsuit, Facebook agreed to stop targeting ads to an individual user using their personal data.
Tanya’s lawsuit argued that Facebook’s targeted advertising system falls within the UK’s definition of direct marketing, giving individuals the right to object.
“Sinister and invasive ads”
Meta – owner of Facebook and Instagram – stated that advertisements on its platforms could only be targeted at groups of at least 100 people, and not at individuals, and would therefore not be considered direct marketing. But the UK Data Protection Authority disagreed.
Tanya claims that Meta has agreed to stop using her personal data for direct marketing purposes, “which, in non-legal terms, means that I have basically achieved disable all sinister adsinvasive and targeted on Facebook.”
As far as she and her lawyers know, she is now the only one of the more than 50 million Facebook users in the UK who is not targeted by personalized ads.
Tanya adds that now there are more than 10 thousand people who opposed Meta so that the company stops using their data for direct marketing – which could lead to new lawsuits.
“Consent or pay”
At the end of September, Meta announced that it would launch a paid subscription service for users who don’t want to see ads.
The advertising model, known as “consent or pay”, is a way for digital platform owners to generate revenue from users who have refused to be tracked.
After three unsuccessful attempts at in vitro fertilization (IVF), Hayley Dawe and her partner Anthony were “shocked” to discover that they were expecting twins and immediately joined several online twin groups and scoured the internet for tips and advice.
They already had a six-year-old daughter, so they were excited about the two new additions. But that excitement turned to devastation when a scan early in the pregnancy confirmed that one of the twins had died a week earlier.
And on the day of the next exam, the room was silent, as her other twin also had no heartbeat — and had died the day before.
“I was devastated“, it says. Hayley looked for support on online forums, but found herself confronted with advertisements for, among other items, maternity clothes, pregnancy pillows and pregnancy tracking apps.
For Hayley, leaving social media was “not an option”, as it was there that she found other women going through similar experiences.
Meta states that Facebook users can block access to topics of ads they don’t want to see through the settings, which offer parenting as a topic alongside things like chocolate, board games, and wrestling.
Hayley says she was shocked to see that pregnancy was not listed as a category separately and claims that turning off the parenting option made no difference, with at least five pregnancy announcements appearing afterwards.
Hayley marked some of the ads as spam, but claims that three weeks later she was still being exposed to repeated pregnancy promotions.
“Why do I have to pay when there are options to change preferences that don’t seem to work?” he asks.
These experiences come as no surprise to former Meta employee Arturo Bejar.
“O [botão] mark as spam It wasn’t connected to anything.“, says Arturo, who was part of the senior management team. “We found that in some cases, aid reports were being discarded because there were too many.”
Bejar worked for Meta between 2009 and 2015 and again from 2019 to 2021. He also gave testimony to the US Congress in 2023 about how he believed Meta was not keeping users safe.
“They love to say they care, but what matters is getting more users to their platforms so they can make more money. I think that’s unforgivable. It’s inhumane“, he adds.
In response, a Meta spokesperson said: “We take these concerns seriously and continue to improve sensitivity and the accuracy of the way ads are served.”
“Our systems are designed to share the most relevant and useful content, but they are not perfect and some ads may occasionally appear insensitive or poorly placed. As we continue to refine our models, we encourage people to opt out of certain categories.”
