Newly unsealed court documents reveal that Meta’s Instagram developed an explicit internal business strategy to addict multiple generations of American families to its platform, deliberately using teenagers as the gateway to recruit parents, younger siblings, and grandparents.
“This internal document proves in black and white that exploiting families is Big Tech’s core business,” said Sacha Haworth, Executive Director of The Tech Oversight Project. “Meta looked at teenagers and saw a distribution network. First, you hook the teens, get the kid hooked, then use them to reel in the whole family. Zuckerberg and Mosseri say they don’t make money from teens, but Meta’s scheme is to exploit teens, so they can drag three generations of advertising targets under the company’s surveillance. These are the same exact strategies used by drug dealers, and Zuckerberg’s own employees called it what it is: pushing.”
The presentation also shows Instagram researchers identifying a specific “problem”: older teen siblings warning preteens about the risks of oversharing online. Rather than welcoming this, Meta framed it as a business obstacle and explored ways to use product design and content ranking to undermine it.
This focus on targeting preteens became a major topic of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s and Instagram boss Adam Mosseri’s cross-examinations this month as they were confronted with past statementsthat conflict with evidence showing Meta executives knew about the prevalence of under-13s like plaintiff KGM on their platforms and purposely sought out this demographic in contravention of federal law.
Internal documents show this was a longstanding pattern: according to employee chats from 2017, “Zuck has been talking about (going after <13y/o users) for a while.” The Wall Street Journal reported: “(Plaintiff’s lawyer Mark) Lanier showed an internal Meta email from 2015 that estimated 4 million children under 13 were using Instagram. He estimated that figure would represent approximately 30% of all kids aged 10 to 12 in the U.S.”
