Google reportedly teamed up with Meta to skirt its own ad exploitation safeguards for teens

Summary

• Google’s collaboration with Meta to promote Instagram to teenagers on YouTube exploited a gray area in its own advertising safeguards.
• The campaign targeted users labeled as “unknown” by an age metric, most likely underage, raising ethical concerns.
• This revelation may lead to potential backlash from regulators, possibly resulting in new lawsuits for anticompetitive collusion.

Google is already in hot waters after being labeled an illegal monopolist in the search engine market, and to make matters worse for the Mountain View, California-based tech giant, it is now facing scrutiny for reportedly hatching plans with Meta to promote Instagram to teenagers.

The two companies, which are rivals in the online advertising space, both stood to gain from the campaign.

The information was broken by The Financial Times (FT), which suggests the campaign took advantage of a gray area in Google’s advertising system. According to the report, Google designed a YouTube ad campaign promoting Meta’s Instagram, specifically targeting a user group labeled “unknown” under the age metric.

According to the tech giant, the unknown group “refers to people whose age, gender, parental status or household income we haven’t identified.” However, according to the report, Google possesses “thousands of data points” to come to the conclusion that a large majority of users in the unknown group are under the age of 18, 13-17 to be specific. It is also alluded that Google’s staff might have knowingly exploited the loophole.

Prioritizing profits over ethics

The seeds for the campaign were reportedly sown in early 2023 when Spark Foundry, which was working on behalf of Meta, approached Google about the campaign. It identified its primary demographic to be targeted as “13 to 17” year-olds, as suggested by obtained emails seen by the FT. Reportedly, Meta was facing declining user engagement among younger users on Instagram at the time, likely because of TikTok’s dominance, and the campaign would have enticed users back to Instagram.

Google, at the time, already had safeguards in place to “to prevent age-sensitive ad categories from being shown to teens,” indicating that it would “block ad targeting based on the age, gender, or interests of people under 18.” However, by exploiting the ‘unknown’ demographic, it knew that ads would likely land on the age demographic targeted by Meta, and was described as a way of “hacking” the safeguards in place. For Google, the benefits of the campaign appear to be only monetary.

Considering that the revelation comes at a time when Google is already facing scrutiny for its monopolistic practices, while Meta is in a land of trouble of its own, it is likely that regulators will jump on the opportunity for a new lawsuit, likely for anticompetitive collusion, deceptive advertising, and most importantly, for targeting minors.