Your Sadness Is Someone Else's Ad Timing

Opening

Dear reader, a teenage girl takes a selfie, doesn’t like it, and deletes it. A few seconds later, a beauty product ad appears on her screen. Coincidence?

In April 2025, testimony before a US Senate hearing suggested it might not be. Sarah Wynn-Williams, Meta’s former Global Director of Public Policy, told senators that Meta had identified the emotional states of teenagers aged 13 to 17 and passed that information along to advertisers — capturing the exact moments they felt “worthless,” “helpless,” or “like a failure.”

But there’s an uncomfortable question buried in this story. If the targets had been adults instead, would this not be a problem at all?

What Happened — The 2017 Leak, The 2025 Testimony

The roots of this story go back to 2017, when the Australian newspaper The Australian obtained and reported on internal Facebook documents. The documents showed that Facebook had been monitoring teenage users in Australia and New Zealand, identifying moments when they needed “a confidence boost,” and pitching advertisers on access to that data.

At the time, Facebook officially responded that it did not offer advertising targeting tools based on emotional state. The company said the internal analysis was meant to help marketers understand their audience, that it had never actually been used for ad targeting, and that it was based on anonymized, aggregated data.

But on April 9, 2025, Wynn-Williams’s Senate testimony called that explanation into question. Answering a question from Senator Blackburn, she stated that Meta had identified moments when teenagers aged 13 to 17 felt depressed or self-critical, and had shared that information with advertisers. When a teenage girl deleted a selfie, she’d be shown a beauty product ad; when she showed anxiety about her body shape, a diet product ad would appear.

More notable still is additional material released in September 2025 by Senator Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. A 2014 internal presentation his office obtained, titled “Global Youth Study,” showed Facebook analyzing the emotional behavior patterns of 1,000 respondents aged 13 to 24 — and explicitly listing the intended audience for the findings as “influencers, agencies, brands, sales, other industries, clients.” This directly contradicts the 2017 claim that the data was “never used for ad targeting.”

To date, Meta hasn’t disputed the accuracy of these records themselves. It has, however, maintained a blanket denial that Wynn-Williams’s testimony as a whole is “divorced from reality and riddled with false claims.”