‘Monetising misery’: Tragic teen’s Facebook bullying hell

A devastated mother has slammed Meta after her teenage daughter was hounded to her death by heartless social media bullies.

A tax perk that allows Meta to move profits from Australia to Ireland should be banned, experts say, amid criticism of the tech giant for failing to protect vulnerable Irish teens.

As News Corp reported earlier this month, Meta is shifting more than $1bn a year in revenue from ad sales from Australia to Ireland, reaping a tax benefit estimated at $262m a year.

At the same time, whistleblowers and distraught parents say the company’s immensely profitable Irish operation isn’t doing enough to protect the country’s children from dangerous online trolls, especially on Facebook.

The concerns of Irish parents mirror those of Australians who, together with News Corp Australia, are calling on the federal government to raise the age limit at which children can access social media to 16 as part of a national campaign, Let Them Be Kids, to stop the scourge of social media.

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Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research principal analyst Jason Ward. Picture: Dylan Robinson

Jason Ward, principal analyst at the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research, said the Irish Meta subsidiary that receives Australian ad dollars reported gross profits of €55.1bn ($A90bn) in 2022 – almost 11 per cent of Ireland’s entire economy.

Corporate tax in Ireland is 15 per cent, half Australia’s rate.

“Meta, Microsoft and other multinationals must be forced to pay taxes on profits earned in Australia – and elsewhere – not where current loopholes allow profits to be artificially shifted,” Mr Ward said.

“Ireland’s gains, at half the rate, are Australia’s losses. This is unfair and has to come to an end.”

Whistleblower Frances Haugen, who leaked thousands of internal Facebook documents related to its content moderation failures in 2021, said Meta had “a windfall of savings from this ferocious tax dodge that it should use to increase safety”.

Jackie Fox. Picture: Supplied

Nicole Fox. Picture: Supplied

And Jackie Fox, the mother of a teenage girl bullied into taking her own life by Facebook trolls, slammed Meta for “monetising the misery of children and young people”.

“They come to Ireland because the taxes are cheap – but they’re powerful money-making multinationals that just don’t care enough to dig deep enough into their profits to protect the user,” she said.

Ireland was identified as the second-biggest corporate tax haven in the world in a global tax evasion report released in October by the EU Tax Observatory, which said companies shift more than $US140bn ($218bn) in profits earned elsewhere to the Emerald Isle.

“An unintended consequence of recent global tax reforms has been to provide Ireland with record tax revenues from a handful of the largest multinationals,” Mr Ward said.

“Ireland is able to tax profits earned in Australia – and around the world – that should be funding our hospitals, schools, aged care and infrastructure.”

Former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen. Picture: AFP

Ms Haugen said that “when these companies shop for cheap taxes, everyone pays the cost”.

“Australia is the only profitable market for advertising capacity in South East Asia for Meta and has a history of imposing oversight on companies like Facebook,” she said.

“My worry is the Irish government is scared of challenging Meta too hard or asking for more transparency on how it operates its platforms, like telling us when it censors, because it’s scared of losing the golden goose.”

Ms Fox’s 21-year-old daughter, Nicole, took her life at the family’s Dublin home in 2018 after falling into a vortex of despair and online bullying.

For three-and-a-half years, a group of around 25 bullies taunted her with videos on WhatsApp on how to kill herself and notes on messenger asking, “Why aren’t you dead yet?”

They also circulated a fuzzy video purporting to be Nicole having sex with three men on a fake Facebook account.

“The bullies got to Nicole on WhatsApp, Facebook, messenger, and Snapchat. The algorithm on some of these platforms means you can’t escape it and it keeps recommending more content,” Ms Fox said.

“Huge tech companies like Facebook owner Meta (which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp) are monetising the misery of children and young people.”

A Meta spokesperson said the company had recently beefed up protections for young people and paid its taxes “as required in each of the countries where we operate”.