A woman has written a heartbreaking open letter to tech companies after she continued to receive infant and motherhood advertisements despite her son being born stillborn.
In a letter posted to Twitter, Gillian Brockell described her online presence in her eighth month of pregnancy - and how tech companies such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Experian all “knew” she was pregnant.
“It’s my fault, I just couldn’t resist those Instagram hashtags #30weekspregnant, #babybump,” Brockell wrote, before acknowledging that she also clicked on Facebook ads for maternity wear, set up a registry on Amazon, and Googled baby-safe crib paint.
However, Brockell, a Washington Post journalist, then asked how the same tech companies who could use algorithms to identify and target her as pregnant were not smart enough to realise she lost her son Sohan in November.
“But didn’t you also see me Googling ‘is this braxton hicks?’ and ‘baby not moving’?” she wrote. “Did you not see the three days of silence, uncommon for a high-frequency user like me? And then the announcement with keywords like ‘heartbroken’ and ‘problem’ and ‘stillborn’ and the two-hundred teardrop emoticons from my friends? Is that not something you could track?”
According to Brockell, whose post has been liked more than 46,000 times and shared more than 20,000, once she’d finally logged back on for “a couple minutes of distraction,” the targeted advertisements were exactly the same as before - “the same as it was when your baby was still alive.”
Brockell points out that this is despite there being 26,000 stillbirths annually in the US, and “millions more” among worldwide users.
And rather than realising that the pregnancy may not have resulted in a baby once users notify the tech companies that certain advertisements are no longer relevant to them, the algorithms instead decide you’ve given birth and “assume a happy result,” Brockell wrote.
“Please, Tech Companies, I implore you: If you’re smart enough to realise that I’m pregnant, that I’ve given birth, then surely you’re smart enough to realise that my baby died, and can advertise to me accordingly, or maybe just maybe, not at all,” Brockell concluded.
The post has resonated with thousands of people, who have expressed their condolences and support for Brockell.
“This is absolutely heartbreaking. I’m sorry. As someone who works in the industry, my peers and I need to do better, because we’ve created very blunt tools that cause terrible outcomes such as this,” one person responded.
