Facebook Leaks Show Kids Are An ‘Untapped’ Opportunity It Wants To Leverage
Image via Mercigod / Shutterstock.com
Last week, the Wall Street Journal may have published a scathing report on the leaks of Facebook’s internal acknowledgement that Instagram does harm to its users, notably teens, but that’s not all there is to report on.
In fact, it keeps getting worse.
On Tuesday, the news outlet added to a now-ongoing series titled The Facebook Files, letting slip the social media giant’s shocking secrets. More internal documents were obtained by WSJ, and these show that Facebook has been contemplating ways to best monetize its younger users.
It was reported that one particular document referred to children aged between 10 to 12 as a “valuable but untapped audience.” This is probably due to the minimum age to sign up for the social media sites being 13, hence a recently postponed effort to build ‘Instagram Kids’—which seems like a bigger bullet dodged by the day.
The best way to grow Facebook, apparently, is “leveraging playdates.”
And why is that so necessary? Well, it was noted in a separated document that the company appears to be struggling with its “acquisition” of teen users, which has been recorded as “slowing down.” This “global teen penetration” is expected to continually fall by another 45% in less than 2 years’ time.
Oh, but wait, there’s more. Another document points out that children are “getting on the internet as young as six years old,” which prompts the company to follow up with, “imagine a Facebook experience designed for youth.”
Gizmodo notes that Facebook’s main revenue comes from its notorious targeted advertising, which has also come under fire lately alongside ‘Instagram Kids’.
In short, data from users is meticulously tracked and compiled to create “profiles” of behavior. These are then used to target them with advertisements before measuring their effectiveness.
Federal law protects children under 13 and their data cannot be tracked in the same way. However, Facebook has been apparently researching ways to convince kids to join the platform as soon as they hit the teen years.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Facebook has denied everything. But at the same time, it refuses to publish these alleged kid-unfriendly documents to prove otherwise.
[via Gizmodo, image via Mercigod / Shutterstock.com]
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