According to The Verge, a trove of internal documents released last week as part of major litigation against Meta, Snap, TikTok, and YouTube reveals how these companies explicitly targeted teen users as a core business strategy. The documents, compiled in a report by The Tech Oversight Project, include a late 2016 email stating Mark Zuckerberg decided the “top priority for the company in H1 2017 is teens,” and a November 2020 Google slide titled “Solving Kids is a Massive Opportunity,” noting kids under 13 are the world’s fastest-growing internet audience. Other records show a 2017 Snap study found 64% of its 13-21-year-old users were on the app in school, and a 2021 TikTok document acknowledged compulsive use on its platform was “rampant.” The first of these consolidated trials, brought by school districts and state attorneys general alleging harm to young users, is set to begin in June, with a federal judge hearing arguments on the trial scope this Monday.
The Teen Growth Playbook
Look, the business logic here isn’t subtle. It’s Customer Acquisition 101, but applied to a vulnerable demographic. Get ’em young, hook ’em for life. The documents show this wasn’t some accidental byproduct; it was a deliberate, top-down mandate. When an email says Zuckerberg made teens the “top priority,” that’s a company-wide marching order. And Google’s internal thinking is even more stark—they saw getting Chromebooks into schools as a direct pipeline to future Google product buyers. That’s long-term market capture. The idea of formalizing “Finsta” behavior with a private Facebook mode? That’s not building a product for user safety first. It’s recognizing an existing, possibly risky, teen behavior and asking how to productize it for engagement. The whole thing reads like a playbook for building habitual users before their brains are fully developed. Seems like a solid business plan, right? But here’s the thing: what are the costs?
Private Warnings vs. Public Statements
This is where it gets really damning. Internally, they were connecting the dots. A 2018 Google deck directly links autoplay to “disrupting sleep patterns.” Meta employees in 2016 fretted about not being able to verify ages or stop predators on a teen-focused app, with one writing, “we can’t enforce against impersonation/predators/press if we don’t have a way to verify accounts.” They even considered delaying letting younger kids on Facebook due to “increased scrutiny.” So they knew. They absolutely knew there were serious safety and health risks. But publicly? It’s a different story. Meta now points to research showing minimal association between social media use and well-being, and has a safety page addressing the litigation. The gap between the internal chatter and the external PR is just vast. It’s one thing to have a risky product. It’s another to have detailed internal discussions about those very risks while publicly downplaying them.
Safeguards as a Feature, Not a Bug
Now, the documents aren’t *all* cynical. They show the companies did brainstorm mitigations. Snap talked about letting users turn off social media during school hours. TikTok admitted to compulsive use and said it needed to give users “better tools.” And maybe the most fascinating bit is the hint that some execs saw well-being features as *good for business*. That 2019 Google doc about disincentivizing growth that hurts wellbeing? It called it “a more sustainable path for growth.” I think that’s probably the most honest line in the whole dump. It acknowledges the current model might be unsustainable. But it also frames the solution in purely business terms—sustainability, brand positivity. It’s not “this is the right thing to do.” It’s “this is the right thing to do *for the brand*.” The full report from The Tech Oversight Project lays out many of these tensions. So, are these safeguards genuine attempts at responsibility, or just risk management and reputation insurance? Probably a mix of both.
The Legal Reckoning
So what now? These documents are weapons in a massive legal fight. The plaintiffs have hit the jackpot with internal comms that basically spell out “motive and opportunity.” The companies will argue, as Meta does, that this is all out of context. They’ll say, of course we think about growth, and of course we think about safety—that’s our job. But when you see the unvarnished language in emails and slide decks, it’s harder to buy the polished PR defense. The judge’s decisions on Monday will shape these trials dramatically. But no matter the legal outcome, these leaks do something important: they pull back the curtain on the cold, calculated business logic that runs underneath the fun, social exterior of these apps. They knew teens were a goldmine. And they knew digging for that gold came with serious dangers. They just mined it anyway.
