Facebook Inc. 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 playdates.
"Why do we care about tweens?" said one document from 2020. "They are a valuable but untapped audience."
Facebook isn’t the only technology company to court children and face scrutiny for doing so. Virtually every major social media platform, including ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok and YouTube, has confronted legal or regulatory problems related to how children use its products.
Federal privacy law forbids data collection on children under 13, and lawmakers have criticized tech companies for not doing more to protect kids online from predators and harmful content.
The Facebook documents show that competition from rivals, in particular Snap Inc.’s Snapchat and TikTok, is a motivating factor behind its work.
The company’s approach to young users is expected to be addressed during a Senate subcommittee hearing on Thursday, which is expected to probe the effects of Facebook’s Instagram platform on mental health.
In calling for the hearing, lawmakers cited Journal reporting earlier this month that Facebook’s own research has shown that Instagram can have a negative effect on teen mental health, especially among girls.
On Monday, Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, said the company would pause the development of a version of the app for children, often referred to as Instagram Kids. He said the company wanted time to talk to parents, experts and lawmakers before proceeding.
He also contended that underage users would simply lie about their age to access Instagram if a version for children under the age of 13 wasn’t available.
Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) and Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn) said they want to know what research Facebook has undertaken to promote and market its products to children, among other topics.
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 offering 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.
In a written statement, Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said the chart was a taxonomy of the stages of childhood for internal discussion.
It isn’t uncommon for companies to pursue young people as customers. Yet the work is sensitive for the social-media giant: Facebook and Instagram prohibit children from using their apps before their teenage years, but the company’s future depends on ultimately recruiting them.
"If kids are under 13, they’re not allowed on Instagram and they should not be using our service," said Mr. Mosseri in a written statement for this article. "It’s not new and it’s not a secret that social-media companies try to understand how teens and preteens use technology.
Like all technology companies, of course, we want to appeal to the next generation, but that’s entirely different from the false assertion that we knowingly attempt to recruit people who aren’t old enough to use our apps."
He said the company had removed more than 600,000 accounts in the past three months for violating its rules on age limits.
Facebook’s first foray into child-specific products was its 2017 launch of Messenger Kids, a video-and-chat app heavy on parental controls. The app says it is designed for users ages 6 through 12 and meets legal requirements on data collection.
The hope was that the family-friendly product would set the stage for the children to eventually adopt other Facebook platforms, the documents show.
"Our ultimate goal is messaging primacy with U.S. tweens, which may also lead to winning with teens," one of the documents said.
That same year, Facebook’s market researchers uncovered a weakness in the plan. Interest in Messenger Kids tapered off after age 10 and tweens viewed Facebook as a product for old people.
They also weren’t yet interested in Instagram and what the document called its focus on "self-presentation." Instagram was vulnerable to a challenge from Snapchat, which had a growing preteen following.
"It’s fun, funny, silly and creative—seemingly made just for them," the 2017 presentation said of Snapchat, warning that "signing up for social media is a given" for tweens.
TikTok’s rise added to the pressure, with the main Facebook product no longer a serious contender among teens.
"Global teen penetration on FB is low, and acquisition appears to be slowing down," a March 2021 document states.
In the U.S., the daily number of teens using Facebook has fallen by 19% over the past two years, another document noted, and would likely fall by an additional 45% by 2023.