Rhiannon Lawson, Hayley Dawe, Sammi Claxon and Tanya O’Carroll to collaborate to go forward together. They are unequivocally furious at the targeted advertising practices employed by Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. Not one of these amazing women hasn’t suffered the heartbreak of losing a child. This trauma is exacerbated by targeted marketing that pushes them toward pregnancy and parenting. Their shared frustration points to a key problem regarding the way digital platforms use personal data—especially in nuanced situations.
Photo of Rhiannon Lawson, with brown hair and brown eyes. She experienced the heartbreaking loss of her son Hudson, who was stillborn at 22 weeks. She and her partner shared publicly about their loss and shifted their environments to block baby-focused ads. Those ads continued to appear on their devices. As a result, Lawson has been left to feel completely sold out.
Hayley Dawe also suffered tragedy when she was pregnant with twins. After suffering a bleed early on in her pregnancy, a later ultrasound showed that one of the twins had passed away. So Dawe was surprised to discover that pregnancy didn’t even appear as its own category among her ad preferences. Despite updating her settings, she saw at least five pregnancy-related ads.
“Why do I have to pay when there are options to change preferences that don’t seem to work?” – Hayley Dawe
Sammi Claxon has experienced the heartache of five miscarriages. To protect her mental health, she has taken the radical but necessary action of going off social media altogether. Claxon expressed her feelings about motherhood, stating, “As soon as you get that positive test, you feel like a mother.” She stressed the heartbreak of bereavement and how losing a child changes one’s entire life’s trajectory, including the focus on money later.
“You have this future plan in your head and when that’s stripped away from you, it’s awful.” – Sammi Claxon
Tanya’s experience is typical of her colleagues. Once she found out she was pregnant in 2017, Facebook started showing her the very specific ads. O’Carroll later filed a lawsuit arguing that Facebook’s advertising practices fell under the UK’s definition of direct marketing. As we reported after her lawsuit, Meta’s unprecedented financial settlement has forced the company to stop making targeted advertising from personal data its “core business model.”
“I know how distressing these adverts are because I’m part of the same parenting club that no one wants to be part of.” – Tanya O’Carroll
This chronic distress experienced by these women and others like them has recently captured the interest of Arturo Bejar, former director of empathy and inclusion at Meta. He criticized the company’s advertising methods, stating that the “mark as spam” button was ineffective in genuinely addressing users’ concerns.
“The mark as spam [button] was not connected to anything,” – Arturo Bejar
Bejar further commented on Meta’s priorities, alleging that the company prioritizes user growth over genuine concern for its users’ well-being.
“They love saying that they care, but they just care about getting more users on their platforms, so that they can make more money. I think it’s inexcusable. It’s inhumane.” – Arturo Bejar
Regulatory Advisor Rhiannon Lawson expressed these concerns, calling into question the ethics of Meta in light of their recently-launched subscription service in the UK. The service lets users pay £2.99 monthly to avoid seeing targeted ads altogether.
“If they [Meta] cared about their users, charging them not to be shown upsetting content seems unreasonable,” – Rhiannon Lawson
These women’s stories shine a spotlight on a critical issue. Technology is notoriously bad at understanding the nuance of human grief. Lawson poignantly articulated this sentiment when she stated, “Technology doesn’t understand loss and in moments when we least expect it, it reminds us with devastating precision of what we no longer have.”