A news website in Australia has claimed that it has seen internal research documents that show how the social media giant Facebook is analysing emotions of teenagers and passing on that information to advertisers in violation of its policies.
The website said Facebook classifies the negative emotions like feeling “stressed,” “anxious,” “nervous” and passes them on to advertisers who in turn target teenagers when they are vulnerable.
Facebook has denied the allegations. The leaked information shows how Facebook “has been honing the covert tools it uses to gain useful psychological insights on young Australian and New Zealanders in high school and tertiary education”, the report claims.
The USA Today claimed Facebook shared the information with an advertiser. “We have a process in place to review the type of research we perform and in this case that process was not followed,” Facebook said in a statement to the newspaper.
“We do not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state," the statement said. “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.” In 2014, Facebook was accused of studying how 700,000 people responded to changes in their news feeds.
