© Rob Dobi / BuzzFeed
Two years ago, a handful of Facebook employees began to raise internal alarms about a series of advertisements appearing in their news feeds. Purchased by a then up-and-coming lip-synching app called Musical.ly — now known as TikTok — the ads featured
teenage girls provocatively gyrating to music in short video clips.
Curious as to why he and his colleagues were seeing ads ostensibly meant for young girls, one Facebook employee, who was also a father, dug into the company's advertising system at the time to determine what was going on. What he discovered wasn't an error, but Facebook's advertising system working as intended.
The social network's algorithms had been optimizing the ads for the audience interacting with them the most: middle-aged men.Initial complaints about the ads, which continued after Musical.ly was acquired and turned into TikTok, were rebuffed. TikTok, which
reportedly spent $1 billion on advertising in 2018, was a valued business partner, one employee was told by higher-ups. Another person in a position to know told BuzzFeed News that a
Facebook manager's response to the concerns was to restrict access to data about the ads' targeting.The ads persisted for at least a year and a half — long after they had been publicly flagged in Facebook's Workplace forum. Following publication of this story company spokesperson Joe Osborne disputed this timeline, saying "This isn't accurate, we first learned about this is in 2019, not 2017."
"It's so weird that I only hear my 8-year old nieces talk about tiktok, but then see these ads with voluptuous young ladies targeted to men over 35 years old," one Facebook data scientist wrote on the company's internal message board last year. "Are we indeed making sure Facebook is not creating a predator's paradise?"
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