In 1984, the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company made an obvious but important observation in a now-infamous report. “Younger adult smokers are the only source of replacement smokers,” read the internal document, written a few years before the company introduced its cartoon mascot, Joe Camel, in the United States. “If younger adults turn away from smoking, the industry must decline, just as a population which does not give birth will eventually dwindle.” It was, in and of itself, a fairly mundane insight: For a business to survive, let alone grow, it of course would need a steady stream of new customers. But when the business in question is marketing a product that kills people, the sentiment takes on a far more ominous tone, and the bluntness with which the RJR report described the importance of hooking kids on a product the company knew to be dangerous was shocking enough to make for an effective anti-smoking campaign, which put the “replacement smokers” line and others like it at the center of advertisements.
Facebook is not exactly like Big Tobacco, though it is often compared to it; its product may be addictive, but it doesn’t kill people—at least not directly. And yet, there are echoes difficult to ignore: A company aware of the harm its products cause but glossing over it and pushing them anyway. This is not a novel observation; a former Facebook executive made the analogy in a Congressional hearing last year. But new revelations from the Wall Street Journal’s “Facebook Files” series makes the similarities almost too direct: As in the case of tobacco companies, internal documents show that Facebook is acutely aware that its continued dominance depends on attracting younger users—and that its plans to do so go well beyond Instagram Kids, which the company has shelved, for now, following a Journal report on the platform’s deleterious impact on teenage girls’ mental health.
According to the Journal, Facebook has spent the past half-decade making “big bets” on products aimed at kids and preteens. An internal report in 2020 obtained by the paper described them as a “valuable but untapped audience,” but they might as well have called them “replacement users”: Fearing a loss of its social media supremacy, Facebook has gone to extensive lengths to appeal to kids, hoping to create a new generation of users. “With the ubiquity of tablets and phones, kids are getting on the internet as young as six years old,” a confidential 2018 document read, per the Journal. “We can’t ignore this and we have a responsibility to figure it out.”
“Imagine a Facebook experience designed for youth,” the document continued.
Company researchers have been working the last five years to do just that, seeking to tailor existing products like its messaging app for different age groups and build products that appeal to kids and tweens, including one idea floated during a presentation to “engage children during play dates,” the Journal reported. Facebook, of course, is not alone in its efforts to tap into this younger market; Facebook’s more aggressive efforts appear to be motivated, in part, by concern that they are losing the demographic to competitors like Snapchat. But the outsize reach and influence of Facebook—as well as its lack of transparency, inability to fully reckon with the issues that plague it, and Machiavellian quest for global domination—throw the creepiness of the whole endeavor into stark relief. It doesn’t only feel like an effort to widen its pool of consumers; it feels like an effort to indoctrinate a new generation of compulsive posters, ones too young to remember a time before the kind of “self-presentation” compelled by Instagram and Facebook, as company market researchers described it. “If it is common that teens are discouraging preteens from sharing,” one researcher wrote in a company document, “there are obvious implications for creation and the ecosystem both in the near and longer-term as preteens are the next generation coming onto the platform.”
Company officials, including Adam Mosseri, head of its subsidiary, Instagram, downplayed the efforts to appeal to preteens, emphasizing that kids under 13 are prohibited from the apps. “Like all technology companies, of course, we want to appeal to the next generation,” Mosseri told the Journal. “But that’s entirely different from the false assertion that we knowingly attempt to recruit people who aren’t old enough to use the app.” Still, the report is sure to add to the mountain of scrutiny already facing the company: It already had to hit pause on Instagram Kids, and a Senate hearing led by Democrat Richard Blumenthal and Republican Marsha Blackburn on Thursday is expected to focus in part on the company’s effects on young users. Whether or not that scrutiny leads to more substantive impacts on Mark Zuckerberg’s empire or not remains to be seen. Are we at or nearing the point at which the “burden of a bad reputation does become too much and starts hurting Facebook where it counts,” as the New York Times’ Shira Ovide suggested Tuesday? Or is this just another storm for the company to weather, with an endless line of new users ready to replace those who call it quits?
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