Parent fury as Meta 'uses photos of schoolgirl' in adverts targeting man

Mark Zuckerberg's social media company has allegedy used photos of schoolgirls to entice a 37-year-old man to its platforms. The unnamed 37-year-old noticed that photos of young girls in school uniform were frequently appearing on his Instagram feed as advertisements for Mr Zuckerberg's social media site Threads, reports suggest. The images were back-to-school snaps shared by the childrens' parents on Instagram, and depicted girls as young as 13 with their faces and names often visible, as per The Guardian.

One outraged mother said her Instagram account was set to private, while others, who had public profiles, said they weren't aware that Meta's settings enabled cross-platform posting. All the pictures were automatically duplicating onto Threads, where they were publicly visible. Many of the posts showed young schoolgirls in short skirts with bare legs, with the father of one 13-year-old slamming their promotion as "absolutely outrageous".

"When I found out an image of her has been exploited in what felt like a sexualised way by a massive company like that to market their product, it left me feeling quite disgusted," he added. Another said it was "deliberately provocative and ultimately exploitative of the children and families involved".

Meta denied that the advertising had violated its policies and said it recommended Threads to users by promoting publicly-shared photos that adhere to its community standards and were posted by adults.

However, the 37-year-old recipient of the controversial posts said he had only been shown photos of schoolgirls and insisted that the marketing had "an aspect of sexualisation".

"As a father, I find it deeply inappropriate for Meta to repurpose these posts in targeted promotion to adults," he added.

The mother of a 15-year-old whose photo was used to advertise Threads said she would not have consented to its use if she had been consulted. "For me it was a picture of my daughter going to school," she said. "I had no idea Instagram had picked it up and are using it as a promotion. It's absolutely disgusting. She is a minor."

Her account reportedly has under 300 followers and only usually gets a handful of views on her posts. The image of her daughter, by contrast, attracted almost 7,000 hits, 90% of which were non-followers, half of whom were over 44 and 90% of whom were men.

Meta, which was originally founded as Facebook and is worth around £1.5 trillion, said the posts functioned as "recommendation tools". A spokesperson added: "The images shared do not violate our policies and are back-to-school photos posted publicly by parents. We have systems in place to help make sure we don't recommend Threads shared by teens, or that go against our recommendation guidelines, and users can control whether Meta suggests their public posts on Instagram."