Mental health advocates have long warned about the impact of social media on adolescents’ self-image, with platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok profiting by exploiting the insecurity of vulnerable users, particularly minors.
In March, those concerns deepened when former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams accused the company in her tell-all book of knowingly tracking accounts of teenage girls who had deleted selfies and then targeting them with beauty ads.
Wynn-Williams, a New Zealand-born lawyer and diplomat who served as Facebook’s public policy director between 2011 and 2017, reveals in her book Careless People that exploiting adolescent insecurity was not a glitch but a feature, with emotional profiling and real-time behavioural cues used to deliver appearance-focused ads at moments of self-doubt.
According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook identified when adolescent girls removed photos of themselves and interpreted the deletion as a signal of low self-esteem, triggering the delivery of beauty-related advertising.
"To me, this type of surveillance and monetisation of young teens’ sense of worthlessness feels like a concrete step toward the dystopian future Facebook’s critics had long warned of," Wynn-Williams writes in her book.
Wynn-Williams has also lodged a 78-page complaint with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The book has become a New York Times best-seller and continues to sell strongly in the United Kingdom, despite legal efforts by Meta to prevent its distribution.
The whistleblower alleges the social media platform allowed hate and let illegal activities be unchecked, a claim that supports former Facebook employee Frances Haugen disclosures.
Allegations expand
The revelations expand on a 2017 investigation by The Australian, which reported that Facebook boasted to advertisers about its ability to identify when young users felt “worthless,” “defeated,” or “like a failure.”
According to Wynn-Williams, these psychological metrics were not just hypothetical — they were actively integrated into ad-targeting strategies, particularly on Instagram, a platform known to affect teen mental health.
In its response to her claims, Meta – formerly Facebook – did not directly address Wynn-Williams’ allegations, instead pointing media inquiries to a 2017 blog post.
That statement denied targeting users based on their emotional state, saying the analysis cited by The Australian was meant to help marketers “understand how people express themselves” and was based on aggregated, anonymous data.
But the book’s detailed internal recollections and allegations of ongoing product development suggest otherwise. Wynn-Williams writes that Facebook’s privacy division was aware of — and even assisted with — building tools that would allow advertisers to tap into behavioural insights without direct oversight from the company itself.
Wynn-Williams, who says Meta threatened legal action to silence promotion of her book, insists that transparency is critical.
“Facebook wasn’t just indifferent to these harms,” she writes. “It designed systems that depended on them.”
Frances Haugen, a 37-year-old data scientist from Iowa, who has worked for companies including Google and Pinterest - says in an interview that Facebook was "substantially worse" than anything she had seen before.
