For anyone curious how Meta could possibly get worse – excellent news.
Meta has used back-to-school pictures of schoolgirls to advertise one of its social media platforms to a 37-year-old man, in a move parents described as “outrageous” and “upsetting”.
The man noticed that posts encouraging him to “get Threads”, Mark Zuckerberg’s rival to Elon Musk’s X, were being dropped into his Instagram feed featuring embedded posts of uniformed girls as young as 13 with their faces visible and, in most cases, their names.
The children’s images were used by Meta after their parents had posted them on Instagram to mark their return to school. The parents were unaware that Meta’s settings permitted it to do this. One mother said her account was set to private, but the posts were automatically cross-posting to Threads where they were visible. Another said she posted the picture to a public Instagram account. The posts of their children were highlighted to the stranger as “suggested threads”.
Weird that the man assumes those images were chosen to target him, but horrifying that he might be right.
The images drew 1000s new views to the instqgram page, 90% were men. I think we can say it was fed to men
I dunno whether that’s Facebook pushing it more often to men (because their analytics shows it works on their audience) or men clicking on it more often because it works on the Facebook audience.
Both? Which feeds the algorithm
They have thousands of employees who discuss and make decisions before anything changes. Everything Meta does is intentional.
Some fraction of the harm they do is by carelessness rather than malice. That some mindless algorithm designed to find and exploit for advertising purposes the posts that got the most engagement disproportionately selected ones featuring images of cute teenagers does not seem unlikely even if it wasn’t aimed specifically at middle-aged parents…
They’ve intentionally maliciously set up systems where “carelessness” leads to these malicious outcomes.
It’s not fail safe, nor fail secure. It’s fail evil.
I don’t think we can apply Hanlon to anything Meta does.
They have been doing it long enough to know that happens.