A grieving mum whose baby girl was stillborn says she was "taunted" by Facebook adverts aimed at new parents just days after the tragedy.
Brave Anna England Kerr, 30, was bombarded with promotions for "baby-related" items after losing her beloved daughter, Clara, at 38 weeks.
Faced with adverts for toys and post-maternity clothes, she found herself only able to scroll so far down her feed before bursting into tears.
But when she clicked on a setting to "hide" parenting adverts for a year, she claims it didn’t work – with upsetting promotions still popping up.
In a powerful open letter to Facebook, the mum tells the company: "Your ads were unintentionally taunting me with reminders of what I’d lost."
She adds: "I kept using Facebook because I needed to. So many of our family and friends are abroad. It gave us an easy way to tell people what had happened instead of having to make dozens of phone calls.
"It gave me a way to feel like I was being social without having to leave home on the days I just couldn’t. It meant I could still talk to friends.
"Being able to reach out in situations like these is incredibly important to your long term mental wellbeing. But I’d scroll through this much needed distraction and my stomach would flip seeing all the tiny babies.
"All the things I would never get to do for her.
"All these things I would never buy."
Facebook said in October that it had discovered a bug and an issue with its "machine learning models in the Hide Ad Topics feature".
A spokesperson said the firm had spoken to Anna and "expressed our deep sympathy for her loss and the additional pain this has caused her".
Little Clara was stillborn in June this year.
In her moving letter, her mum writes: "No words can do justice to the pain, shock and helplessness that I felt when this happened."
But only days later, she was faced with an ad for a baby toy.
"This feeling just rips through you," the mum told Mail Online. "It’s like someone has shoved a knife inside you and torn it through you."
She added that she found herself thinking, "I’m never going to buy that for Clara, that’s never going to be me with Clara now".
Since then, Anna has been presented with other parenting adverts – including ones for post-maternity clothes and Cow & Gate products.
She says she was also faced with an advert for the flower delivery company Interflora, which celebrated the role of fathers at birth.
"It starts with the tagline: ‘Things didn’t go as we’d expected’," said the mum, who lives in south London with her partner.
"Obviously their birth went well because it’s a flower company, but I don’t stick around to [watch] the rest of the video."
In her open letter, Anna describes how Facebook has been "in the background" of many of her life events, both good and bad.
"You’ve tracked boyfriends and breakups, helped me organise meet ups and house moving parties; and you have lots of photos of me beaming in a pretty dress on my wedding day," she writes.
"I was on the brink of being one of those infuriatingly happy people that clogged everyone’s newsfeed with ‘funny’ posts about their child. Or rather I’ll never know what kind of parent I would have been, because Clara died."
She says she and her partner turned to Facebook to "quietly" tell their loved ones about the tragedy – but were confronted by baby-related adverts.
Anna could do only so much scrolling "without bursting into tears", so she found the setting to hide parenting ads for a year and clicked it.
"Over the coming months my feed still had hundreds of baby products on. I had to steel myself before going on," she claims in the letter.
"Ad blockers were ineffective and no matter how many times I gave feedback that the baby ads were ‘not relevant to me’ or I clicked on ANY ad for ANYTHING else regardless of whether I was interested or not, it did little to change what I was advertised."
The mum – who spoke to the BBC about her ordeal earlier this year – then urges Facebook to "please get better at selling me stuff".
"Make the way you target ads or sell data more responsive to people hiding parenting ads or similar topics," she writes in the letter, which was posted on her blog, Still Not Here. "Sell us other stuff instead. I’m happy for you to use my data as long as you don’t use it to make me cry."
Anna received a phone call from Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook’s vice president of EMEA, earlier this year, according to Business Insider.
In the call, Ms Mendelsohn reportedly apologied that the Facebook ads had made the mum feel worse and explained about the bug in the system.
A Facebook spokesperson said the bug has since been fixed and the company continues to speak to Anna to resolve the problems she has faced.
Mirror Online has contacted Facebook for comment.
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