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Facebook's Effort To Attract Preteens Goes Beyond Instagram Kids, Documents Show (wsj.com) 36

Posted by BeauHD from the not-cool dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Facebook has come under increasing fire in recent days for its effect on young users and its efforts to create products for them. Inside the company, teams of employees have for years been laying plans to attract preteens that go beyond what is publicly known, spurred by fear that Facebook could lose a new generation of users critical to its future. Internal Facebook documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show the company formed a team to study preteens, set a three-year goal to create more products for them and commissioned strategy papers about the long-term business opportunities presented by these potential users. In one presentation, it contemplated whether there might be a way to engage children during play dates. "Why do we care about tweens?" said one document from 2020. "They are a valuable but untapped audience."

The Facebook documents show that competition from rivals, in particular Snap Inc.'s Snapchat and TikTok, is a motivating factor behind its work. [...] Over the past five years, Facebook has made what it called "big bets" on designing products that would appeal to preteens across its services, according to a document from earlier this year. In more than a dozen studies over that period, the documents show, Facebook has tried to understand which products might resonate with children and "tweens" (ages 10 through 12), how these young people view competitors' apps and what concerns their parents. "With the ubiquity of tablets and phones, kids are getting on the internet as young as six years old. We can't ignore this and we have a responsibility to figure it out," said a 2018 document labeled confidential. "Imagine a Facebook experience designed for youth."

Earlier this year, a senior researcher at Facebook presented to colleagues a new approach to how the company should think about designing products for children. It provided a blueprint for how to introduce the company's products to younger children. Rather than offer just two types of products -- those for users 13 and older, and a messenger app for kids -- Facebook should tailor its features to six age brackets, said a slide titled "where we've been, and where we're going." The age brackets included: adults, late teens ages 16 to maturity, teens ages 13 to 15, tweens ages 10 to 12, children ages 5 to 9 and young kids ages zero to four. [...] "Our ultimate goal is messaging primacy with U.S. tweens, which may also lead to winning with teens," one of the documents said. Yesterday, Facebook paused its plans to develop a version of Instagram for kids under 13 after facing pressure from lawmakers.
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Facebook's Effort To Attract Preteens Goes Beyond Instagram Kids, Documents Show More

Facebook's Effort To Attract Preteens Goes Beyond Instagram Kids, Documents Show

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  • Facebook's sewage is as if McDonalds made packets.

  • ...just like we already do other mass media. Then we wouldn't be so vulnerable to hostile govt influence & disruption campaigns targeting elections (e.g. UK, US, French & German elections), public health (anti-vax, quack COVID-19 'cures'), & public order in general (6th January riots in Washington). Not necessarily started by hostile govts but they have the resources to make such movements optimally disruptive, or to 'fan the flames.' As we've seen from these social media corporations' behaviour

    • Yep, mass media so well regulated that Fox News, OAN and the Sinclair network could....never....umm....?

      • Yep, mass media so well regulated that Fox News, OAN and the Sinclair network could....never....umm....?

        Yup, don't forget to add MSNBC and CNN and well, all 3 main broadcast networks' news output.

    • The only regulations I could see for social media would be to age restrict it....21 and older only.

      And maybe to force them to be more like a common carrier type regulation where speech from all sides could be allowed.

      I only add the last one because social media has evolved into the new public square and by allowing these companies to control the speech there...they have WAY too much power to shape and mold the conversation in the US.

      We don't want the govt regulating our speech, do we really want to trust

      • So far as I am concerned, they crossed a line when they started censoring speech at the direction of government officials. The officials should be charged official misconduct and corruption for having done so, and the company execs need to go for having agreed.
      • "...like we already do other mass media." Facebook, Twitter, et al. haven't delivered on their promises of uniting the world to sit in a circle singing Kumbaya. So far, we have a lot of indignant outrage, social division & conflict, dangerous lies & people are dying because of them. It increasingly looks like they've calculated that they can make more money out of tearing civilisation asunder than contributing to it.
    • Because putting the government in charge of the media can only work out well, right? Iâ(TM)m sure that no politician would abuse that authority to prevent people from criticizing them or beating them in an election. Things are great in countries that do it, just look at how happy, free and prosperous Russia and China are.
      • "...just like we already do other mass media." Our govts have been regulating TV & radio for decades. I guess that means we're living in an unfree dystopia then.
        • Regulation can vary greatly in scope, degree and form. Do not use these seven words or show nudity in over the air broadcasts before 9pm is one thing, remove anything that criticizes a politician or policy is quite another, but both would be regulations.

          You can not have a culture that promotes free speech without being exposed to people who would abuse it for their own ends. You can not have a free society without free speech. But more than that, you seem to be operating under the misassumption that t

          • The alternative is for our democracies & societies to continue to be undermined by hostile actors, e.g. some of the most influential Facebook agents/groups are eastern European troll farms. Apparently, they're very good at it & Facebook gain a competitive advantage & are making a lot more money because of them ("user engagement metrics" are what they use to sell their services to advertisers). Those troll farms have become hot property to the advertising industry & a threat to our societies.

  • Facebook = Predators (Score:4, Informative)

    by Sebby ( 238625 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @08:26PM (#61842929)

    "Why do we care about tweens?" said one document from 2020. "They are a valuable but untapped audience."

    This makes me sick to my stomach.

  • Sounds like a good idea... (Score:3)

    by gillbates ( 106458 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @08:30PM (#61842937) Homepage Journal

    If facebook could become known as a "teens' thing" that adults eventually outgrow, the world would be a much better place.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jastiv ( 958017 )
      Facebook is not something that people under 25 bother with in my experience. Its is a space filled with people in middle age.

  • Facebook needs to die and may it's carcass get many graffitis on it.

  • I don't even have children yet, and I'm furious (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Pierre Pants ( 6554598 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @08:46PM (#61842963)
    so I don't even want to know the amount of anger that parents (sensible, intelligent parents, that is) feel about this predatory company and other companies that are trying to trap their impressionable children in a world of endless depression (which Facebook itself acknowledges their services cause in teenagers), predators, privacy and identity theft and doxxing issues, etc. I'm sick and tired of the fact that most parents don't care about this stuff at all. They literally allow their children to be abused. It's sickening. Unless enough people finally raise their voice and demand legislation against those psychopathic lowlifes, those companies will continue to gain power and ruin children's lives, even far more than they already ruin adults' lives.

    • Are they any worse than toy companies, movie studios, musicians, or "Teen Beat" type magazines who compete for $$$ from kids and/or their parents?

      • Maybe? Those are very different models. For one, the commodity from which profit is made is on one side pop music, and on the other, information about children. I donâ(TM)t think there is data showing similar psychological harm either, but that data could be crap anyhow.

        I donâ(TM)t know about the toy or teen magazine industry, but I do know something about the music biz. It is riddled with crooks and corruption. Just try and get a venue owner to pay up without letting them see you are packi

    • And yet parents could stop that in a day if enough agreed and they had the will to act.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Your own damn fault (Score:3)

    by belthize ( 990217 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @11:44PM (#61843209)

    If you have a Facebook account and more importantly, if your kids have a Facebook account you have nobody to blame but yourself.

    From just about day one people have been pointing out that when it comes to Facebook (and their ilk) you are the product. From their perspective you are there to be manipulated into making more money for Facebook. They're doing nothing illegal, they're simply doing what they were designed to do.

    If you don't like it don't cater to them, humans managed to stay in contact and survive for a long time before Facebook, they can manage long after they're gone. Besides nobody outside of your spouse (and that's debatable) really gives a shit what you did today.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by doom ( 14564 )

      There's been a pattern for decades of using personal responsibility to distract people from corporate responsibilty. ("What can one man do, my friend, what can one man do?")

      Network effects. Unregulated monopoly growth. Personal choices made against a background of other personal choices. Software intentionally designed to be "addictive", but not subject to the controls that addictive substances are. Regulatory environment sabotaged by decades of corporate-dominated politics, and lagging well behind m

      • That's a good point, and I agree with it to an extent.

        But while the drug addiction analogy is appealing and obvious it's kind of stretched. Disney makes movies targeted at children, McDonalds puts toys in their Happy Meals(TM), they do it to make a profit, should that be legislated, can it be ?

        In the end entities like Disney and Facebook can only survive in the ecosystem if their prey fails to evolve. There's no way to legislate it. The saving grace is that kids are fickle and historically view things p

  • The incessant articles against Facebook and nothing else, this is such tiring to see succeed every time on Americans. Wether it is Iraq war, or a BLM protest in the election year, this is how middle-class Democratic voter-base justifies itself that it is doing good - by targeting the next evil thing.

  • Old, but true, which should suggest they actually hope for that addictive effect...

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