Facebook and Twitter apologise after mother who suffered a stillbirth is bombarded with baby ads

Facebook and Twitter have apologised to a mother who suffered a stillbirth after she was bombarded with adverts for baby products and adoption services.

Gillian Brockell, a journalist with The Washington Post, hit back at targeted advertising of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram after she returned home from the hospital and kept getting baby-related sales pitches.

She said that if those social media giants were clever enough to know she was pregnant they should also have known she'd lost the baby.

"I know you knew I was pregnant," Brockell wrote to the companies in a letter posted 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. pre-term 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."

"We have a setting available that can block ads about some topics people may find painful - including parenting.

"It still needs improvement, but please know that we're working on it & welcome your feedback," Goldman wrote.

Brockell said she knew there was such a setting but that it was not easy to find at first, especially amid all her grieving.

"We never asked for the pregnancy or parenting ads to be turned on; these tech companies triggered that on their own, based on information we shared," Brockell wrote.

"So what I'm asking is that there be similar triggers to turn this stuff off on its own, based on information we shared."

She said that after she blocked the baby ads, she got ads on how to adopt a child.

A Twitter spokesperson said: "We cannot imagine the pain of those who who have experienced this type of loss," it said.

"We are continuously working on improving our advertising products to ensure they serve appropriate content to the people who use our services."

Targeted ads have become a growing problem for mothers who have undergone similar tragedies.

Anna England-Kerr said last month that the social media site had been “taunting” her following the death of her baby, with adverts for IVF treatments, cots and newborn products despite having changed her account settings.    

Mrs England-Kerr told The Telegraph: “Fourth months after my baby passed I was still receiving adverts for cots [and] changing my settings made no difference. It shouldn’t be this hard. I shouldn’t have to furiously change all the settings to prevent this. I know I am not the only person who has been put through this.”  

Facebook offered Mrs England-Kerr a telephone apology, blaming a glitch in its software. However, Mrs England-Kerr remained uncertain when the situation would be rectified.

A Facebook spokesperson said: “We discovered a bug and an issue with our machine learning models in the Hide Ad Topics feature.

“The bug has been fixed, but we are continuing to improve our machine learning models to detect and prevent these ads.”

Instagram  have been contacted for comment.

An Experian spokesperson said: "We have reached out to Gillian Brockell and have expressed our deepest condolences, as well as our apologies for the unfortunate email.

"The communication was delivered because Gillian is currently enrolled in our identity protection solution, which offers the opportunity to also monitor family members’ information on the dark web.

"While the email was not based on marketing data, we understand the inappropriate timing of the communication. We will remove the family feature from her membership and have offered to discuss the matter further with her."