In an upsetting incident, a 37-year-old man revealed that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta used the photographs of school-going teen girls to advertise one of its social media platforms – without their consent. The platform used back-to-school pictures of girls in a move parents described as “outrageous” and “upsetting”.

The man who disclosed this claimed his feed has posts that encouraged him to “get Threads”, a new platform of Meta and a rival of Elon Musk’s X. The posts had uniformed girls as young as 13 with their faces visible and, in most cases, their names.

The images were posted by the parents of the girls on Instagram to mark their return to school. The parents were unaware that their Meta setting was allowing them to automatically post their photos on Thread. One mother said her account was set to private, but the posts were automatically cross-posting to Threads, where they were visible, The Guardian reported.

The posts of children were highlighted to the stranger as “suggested threads”. The father of a 13-year-old who appeared in one of the posts told the British newspaper, “When I found out an image of her has been exploited in what felt like a sexualised way by a massive company like that to market their product it left me feeling quite disgusted.”