The Wall Street Journal released the second installment of its “The Facebook Files” investigative series on Tuesday, delving even deeper into the omnipresent platform's efforts to target and recruit young children.
Internal papers obtained by the Journal indicate that Facebook established a dedicated team to research youngsters and consider methods to commercialize them. One such paper is alleged to allude to youngsters aged 10 to 12 (“tweens”) as a “valuable but underserved audience.” Another idea is to “leverage playdates” to boost Facebook's “growth.”
Another document quoted by the article, dated March 2021, mentions Facebook's "global adolescent penetration" and cautions that "acquisition" of teen users "appears to be slowing down." According to the Journal, Facebook anticipates its adolescent viewership to drop by an additional 45 percent by 2023.
Facebook's profitable ad-driven business draws virtually all of its earnings on its users' ubiquitous tracking; data that it then utilizes to develop detailed behavior profiles used to "micro-target" advertising and assess their success. While federal law bans the collection of data from children under the age of 13, Facebook has spent years attempting to get youngsters to use its services as soon as they are old enough to be monitored.
According to another Facebook document published by the Journal, children as young as six years old are “getting on the internet.” “Imagine a Facebook experience tailored to young people,” it adds.
Facebook said this week that it was postponing plans to create a “Instagram Kids” app. The declaration came after another Journal story revealed that Facebook was aware, based on internal studies, that Instagram was having a detrimental influence on the mental health of certain adolescent users. “We exacerbate body image difficulties for one in every three young females,” according to the study, which also noted that some teen girls have linked their suicide thoughts to their experiences on the site.Facebook later stated that the research's statement was deceptive and that the finding only related to "those teenage females who told us they were having body image concerns and indicated that using Instagram made them feel worse—not one in three of all teenage girls."
The study prompted Democratic legislators to urge on CEO Mark Zuckerberg to halt the Instagram Kids initiative, claiming that the program "poses substantial dangers to the wellbeing of young people."
Facebook has disputed the Journal's portrayal of its Instagram study, but has so far refused to make that data accessible for review—and has generally sought to stymie independent research into the inner workings of its platforms. At a conference on Monday, Facebook's policy leader, Nick Clegg, stated that the firm will share two internal PowerPoint decks summarizing its findings "both to Congress and then to the public in the coming few days."
The papers referring to children as a "valuable" and "untapped" population contradict Facebook's stated objectives for launching a kids-centric service: Facebook has stated that children under the age of 13 are more likely to try to join Facebook and Instagram while lying about their age. According to the firm, developing an app exclusively for children will assist to protect kids by separating them from adults online.
A Senate subcommittee chaired by Sen. Richard Blumenthal will hold a hearing on the findings of Facebook's unpublished internal research on Thursday at 10:30 a.m. ET. Facebook's global head of safety, Antigone Davis, is slated to testify.
“This hearing will investigate the harmful impacts of Facebook and Instagram on young people and others, and it is one of several that will pose serious questions about whether Big Tech firms are deliberately harming people while hiding that knowledge,” Blumenthal said.
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