Targeting Teens: Social Media Weapons Marketing

Teens are an at-risk demographic on social media as they are both impressionable and are often interacting with online platforms without supervision. Weapons companies online advertising practices targeting young people have resulted in lawsuits concerning the use of their weapons in several school shootings. This targeted marketing, in combination with artificial intelligence driven recommender algorithms that curate social media content based on user data, create an unhealthy and dangerous platform for gun content to be consumed by teens. This paper explores the ethical concerns at the intersection of weapon advertising on Instagram targeting young users and the role of algorithm-driven content curation. By analyzing the case study of the Uvalde shooting and the resulting lawsuits, we highlight the impact of exposure to social media weapons content on youth. We argue that new safeguards are needed to strengthen social media content moderation practices to protect vulnerable teen and young adult audiences. Social media companies have enacted safety measures and restrictions for other harmful content related to eating disorders or acts of self-harm. Potential technical solutions and policy frameworks are readily available to better regulate weapons manufacturer advertising and reform current content moderation gaps that permit weapons content reaching teens through recommender algorithms. A multifaceted approach to this problem would require a improvements in gun-related content image detection, gun-related content search restrictions, industry-wide weapons advertising restrictions, and enhanced parental controls to provide important additional safeguards for youth on social media from being exposed to weapons content.