Instagram Targets Young Users Because They’re More Susceptible to Advertisements

2. Meta specifically targets young users.

68. Meta is financially motivated to attract and retain young users on its Social Media Platforms and has been for many years. [Redacted]

69. [Redacted]

70-73. [Redacted]

74. This concern over young user engagement (and its decline) naturally has extended to Instagram.

75. About 22 million teens log on to Instagram in the U.S. each day.

76. In recent years, Instagram has become Meta’s most successful Social Media Platform in attracting and retaining young users.

77. Within approximately two years of its purchase by Meta, over 50% of teenagers in the United States used Instagram, and [Redacted]

78-81. [Redacted]

82. [Redacted] Meta and its advertisers want to attract young people because they are more likely to: (1) be influenced by advertisements; (2) become lifelong customers; and (3) set trends that the rest of society emulates. To draw young people into its ecosystem and keep them coming back, Meta employs technologies designed to maximize young users’ time on, and engagement with, its Social Media Platforms.

83-84. [Redacted]

85. But externally, Meta has denied that it places a monetary value on young users. On September 30, 2021, at a Senate subcommittee hearing, Senator Amy Klobuchar asked Meta executive Antigone Davis what Meta believed the lifetime monetary value of young users was; Davis responded, “[t]hat’s just not the way we think about [it].” Davis also denied that Meta “considered the profit value of developing products when [Meta] make[s] their decisions of how those products look,” testifying that this would be a “terrible business model.”