Facebook Advertising Has Allegedly Been Targeting Unhappy Teens With Pick-Me-Up Posts

A document has leaked showing that Facebook has the capacity to know when teenagers are feeling down.

The Australian reported on the leak, which proved that Facebook’s data had such great insight it could tell when younger users were feeling "stressed", "defeated", "overwhelmed", "anxious", "nervous", "stupid", "silly", "useless" and a "failure".

The leaked document was prepared by two Australian Facebook executives for a top Australian bank and boasted of a database of 1.9 million high schoolers, 1.5 million tertiary students and 3 million young workers.

It explained that it could read users' emotions using internal data that had not been made available to the public.

The document outlined that they can do this by analysing certain information users put on their site such as location and relationship status, as well as their number of friends on the platform and how often they access it.

It also indicated that the data on the moods of young people could be "shareable under non-disclosure agreements only" with potential advertisers.

Facebook outlined in the document that "Monday-Thursday is about building confidence; the weekend is for broadcasting achievements."

Facebook has made two statements since The Australian article was published. A spokeswoman released a statement to The Australian on Sunday which read that "we have opened an investigation to understand the process failure and improve our oversight. We will undertake disciplinary and other processes as appropriate."

On Monday, however, they denied that they "offer tools to target people based on their emotional state" and claimed that the original article was misleading.

So, if you put every single detail of your life on social media, there's a chance that some major companies in Australia could low-key know a lot about your life. Maybe you might want to, err, remove a few important details.

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