Social media ‘targets teens with booze ads’

Facebook and Instagram have systematically targeted more than 90 per cent of Australian teens with ads for alcohol and junk food after secretly monitoring their online activity, a study has found.

Alcohol ads appeared in the Facebook and Instagram feeds of 93 per cent of 16 and 17-year-olds after the social media giants tracked what pages they liked, what they bought and what they said to friends in the comments.

Facebook and Instagram have systematically targeted more than 90 per cent of Australian teens who use their platforms with ads for alcohol and junk food after secretly monitoring their online activity, a new study has found.

Alcohol ads appeared in the Facebook and Instagram feeds of 93 per cent of 16 and 17-year-olds after the social media giants tracked what pages they liked, what they bought and what they said to friends in the comments, researchers found.

By analysing the data of 83 people aged 16 to 25 from mid-2021, researchers also discovered for the first time how Facebook’s ad model was able to determine which young people drank more alcohol without asking them.

Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, tracks people who use their platforms and turns their activity into a long list of keywords or “interests”.

The average person in the unpublished study by researchers from the University of Queensland and Monash University, in partnership with VicHealth, had 787 keywords, covering all aspects of their interests such as a person’s sexuality and what films they liked.

If one user has a similar set of keywords to another user who engages with lots of alcohol ads, Meta will also show that person alcohol ads.

Among five participants aged 17, there were 41 alcohol-related keywords including “alcohol”, “alcoholic drink”, “bars”, “bartender” and “beer”, along with alcohol brands and retailers.

Researchers then surveyed young people about their drinking habits and found a significant association between alcohol-­related keywords and alcohol use, which means Meta is getting the profiling right.

“Without asking you whether you drink or whether you gamble or whether you eat unhealthy food, Facebook can figure it out just by watching you use their digital services, and then drive the ad-model to target more of those products to you,” University of Queensland director of digital cultures and societies, Nicholas Carah said.

“If your ad model is tuned to finding out who drinks more and showing them more alcohol ads, then that should be off limits because it’s going do people a lot of harm. Same goes for gambling and unhealthy food,” he said.

Forty-two per cent of 16 to 25-year-old participants were ­assigned “alcohol” as an advertising interest and 21 per cent were assigned “gambling”.

A Meta spokesperson said since 2021, the company had “limited advertisers’ ability to reach teens based on their in-app activity, including who they follow on Instagram and what Facebook pages they like”.

“Age and location are the only information about a teen that we use to show them ads,” they said.

Researchers say nothing much has changed and the company still uses modelling to fine-tune what young people click on.

Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education chief Caterina Giorgi said children should not be profiled online or have their data collected, particularly to sell them unhealthy and addictive products. “Without intervention, these labels will follow them for life,” she said.

Ms Giorgi said the public had been left in the dark around how these ad models worked and government needed to implement “commonsense reforms”.

“These platforms should be required to reveal how their ad models work in order to demonstrate that they are not using data to target children and that they’re not using this data to understand whether people drink more or whether they gamble more and then use that to target people’s vulnerabilities,” she said.

David Pocock, who is hosting a roundtable on Tuesday looking at the advertising of alcohol, gambling and junk food to children, said it was “disturbing and unacceptable that teens under 18 are being targeted with gambling and alcohol advertising”.

“Clearly current restrictions aren’t working to prevent children from being exposed to these types of ads, something my community regularly writes to me about,” Senator Pocock said. “Self-regulation is potentially not the best way to deal with things as important as people’s data or advertising where there’s a financial incentive that doesn’t necessarily align with social good.”