Facebook Says It’s Not Profiting From Suicidal Teenagers

Yesterday, news broke out that Facebook could identify users that were going through a difficult emotional stage and used this information to help banks make a buck. The social media company has since been on damage control, saying that the news articles insinuating such a scenario were misleading. In short, Facebook is making a complete denial of profiting from teens with suicidal tendencies.

The news was first broken by The Australian, with the publication acquiring documents prepared by Facebook executives pertaining to the company’s ability to identify insecure or depressed teens. The documents were intended to be shown to banks in the country.

According to Facebook, this was not meant as a targeted approach to advertising, with depressed teenagers as the goal. Rather, it was intended as a demonstration of how the social network could identify emotions, which could then be used to tailor certain ads from particular companies to specific demographics.

In response to a request for a comment from Tech Crunch, a Facebook spokesperson called the article by The Australian misleading. While the social network is not exactly denying the existence of the documents covered by the Australian publication, the company absolutely denies that it is using ad-targeting practices that are based on the emotions of its users.

“The premise of this article is misleading,” the spokesperson said, referring to the piece by The Australian. “We do not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state. The analysis done by an Australian researcher was intended to help marketers understand how people express themselves on Facebook. It was never used to target ads and was based on data that was anonymous and aggregated.”

This empathic denial by the company is somewhat dampened by its history of actually engaging in mass emotional manipulation, with millions of its own users being used as guinea pigs in the past. As a result, it’s a bit difficult to believe that Facebook isn’t doing what its own documents indicate it is doing.