Is Facebook targeting children? Yes, according to an investigation

Tuesday the Wall Street Journal has published a new chapter of his investigation called “The Facebook Files“, Entering even more into the merits of the ubiquitous social platform’s efforts for making children an integrated and active part of their users. In fact, some documents show how the company is looking for a way to monetize its smaller users.

Does Facebook want to target children?

Facebook seems to be increasingly interested in younger audiences, as evidenced by one of the documents mentioned by the editors of the Wall Street Journal, in which social analysts refer to children between the ages of 10 and 12 (the so-called tweens) as a “valuable but untapped audience“. Still according to these documents, fewer and fewer young people choose social media as a reference point, which is why these searches have begun.

Facebook’s business relies primarily on advertising and derives nearly all of its profits from the pervasive monitoring of its users, whose data is used to create comprehensive behavior profiles used to create personalized ads for each user and measure its effectiveness. Since federal law prohibits the collection of data belonging to children under the age of 13, Facebook has spent years looking for a way to get kids to adopt its services as soon as they are old enough to be part of the ads machine. .

One of the methods identified by Facebook was probably “Instagram Kids”Whose development, however, was blocked just a few days ago. This stop is due to a research which showed that Facebook was aware that Instagram had a negative impact on the mental health of some teen users.

Of course, the company at that point defended itself by saying that the results of the investigations were misleading, but that was enough to force the social network to close the project ahead of time. However, we do not doubt that the administration of the social network is already planning a new strategy in this regard.