Woman slams baby ads after stillbirth

A woman whose child was stillborn has slammed the targeted advertising of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram after she returned home from the hospital and kept getting baby-related sales pitches. Gillian Brockell, a journalist with The Washington Post, said that if those social media giants were clever enough to know she was pregnant they should also have figured out she’d lost the baby. She shared the bad news last month in a tweet.

“I know you knew I was pregnant,” Brockell wrote to the companies in a letter posted Wednesday on The Washington Post and Twitter. “It’s my fault, I just couldn’t resist those Instagram hashtags — #30weekspregnant, #babybump. And, silly me! I even clicked once or twice on the maternity wear ads Facebook served up.” “But didn’t you also see me googling ‘braxton hicks vs. preterm labor’ and ‘baby not moving’?”, Brockell added.

“Did you not see my three days of social media silence, uncommon for a high-frequency user like me? “And then the announcement post with keywords like ‘heartbroken’ and ‘problem’ and ‘stillborn’ and the 200 teardrop emoticons from my friends? “Is that not something you could track?” Facebook’s vice-president of advertising Rob Goldman responded to Brockell apologetically, lamenting her “painful experience with our products.”