According to reports, tech giants Google and Meta worked together on a marketing project to show ads for Instagram to YouTube users aged 13 to 17. This went against Google’s own rules about how to treat children online.
The Financial Times and internal sources say that Google worked with Mark Zuckerberg’s company Meta on an ad campaign that specifically targeted a group of YouTube users that the company knew were “unknown” in its advertising system and were more likely to be under 18. Google’s rules say that you can’t personalize or target ads to children, so this project did things like show ads based on demographics and go around Google’s own rules.
Google and Meta, the world’s largest online ad networks, are usually fierce competitors. However, they started working together at the end of last year as Google tried to make more money from ads and Meta tried to keep young users’ attention while TikTok and other fast-growing competitors fought for it. Spark Foundry, an American branch of the French advertising giant Publicis, worked on the project. We tested it in Canada from February to April this year, and then in the U.S. in May.
Google saw the test projects as a way to get to know Meta better and build a more profitable “full-funnel” relationship with them, including more expensive “brand” ads on YouTube and other sites. However, when the Financial Times approached Google about the claims, they started looking into them. The project has since been scrapped.
Google said that because of technology protections, people under the age of 18 are not allowed to personalize ads. But it didn’t say that it wasn’t using the “unknown” loophole, which let the company target users without being sure they were children.
Meta didn’t think that choosing an “unknown” group was personalization or breaking any rules. It said that when advertising its services, it followed its own rules as well as the rules of its peers. The company has made it clear that it wants young people to use its tools to make friends, find community, and find out what they’re interested in.
Meta’s policies on children have been under a lot of scrutiny for a long time. The Federal Trade Commission is still investigating and filing cases against the company. In 2021, the company scrapped plans to make a version of Instagram for kids because of backlash from the public and secret research that said the app was bad for teenage girls’ mental health.
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