Two weeks after dozens of state attorneys general sued Meta for allegedly getting adolescents addicted to its platforms and jeopardizing their safety, Instagram head Adam Mosseri posted an internal memo pushing his employees to pursue one overarching goal: bring more teens to Instagram.
“As you are building out your 2024 plans, I’m asking that the business teams stay laser focused on 1) teens, particularly in developed markets and 2) Threads, and in that order,” Mosseri wrote in the Nov. 6, 2023, memo.
Mosseri’s memo is part of a multiyear plan by Meta, which owns Instagram, to bring more teens onto the photo-sharing app and increase their activity there, according to internal documents written between 2023 and 2025 and viewed by The Washington Post. They show that Instagram staffers considered the mandate to boost teen metrics their top goal last year. It ranked even above efforts to build out Threads, its breakout text-based social media rival to X, formerly known as Twitter.
Outwardly, Meta executives projected confidence in the success of its social media apps, presenting statistics year after year depicting overall user growth. But behind the scenes, the internal documents show, Instagram has waged an aggressive campaign to win back teenagers it was losing to competitors, rolling out a mix of internal initiatives, marketing campaigns and product changes aimed at boosting the app’s appeal to younger users. By late 2023, Meta had set ambitious goals for Instagram, the documents show: to halt a years-long slide among teen users in developed markets, including key places in North America and Europe, by the end of 2024 and to make the app the world’s largest platform for teens by 2027.
To foster teen user growth, Instagram deployed a range of tactics both inside and outside the company. Meta installed what it called a “living museum” in its offices to help employees internalize the lifestyles of their teenage targets. In at least one case it featured photos of top teen hangout places — a fast-food restaurant and a mall — and instructions on how to take wacky, teen-style selfies, according to photos of the exhibit. The company directed staff to boost teen-friendly influencers, adjust Instagram’s algorithm to make it easier for new teen users to find people they know, and invest in paid marketing that highlighted the app’s role in helping teens connect with friends, the documents show.
As the company executed its campaign to win the loyalty of younger users, it was defending itself against a mounting number of lawsuits alleging its social media apps — in particular Instagram — were harmful to teens. The company had been under scrutiny since at least 2021, when a Wall Street Journal report detailed internal research showing that Instagram worsened body issues for some teen girls. In 2023, lawsuits by 41 states and D.C. alleged Meta exploited young users for profit including by issuing changes to keep them on the site at the expense of their well-being, violating consumer protection laws.
Meta leaders rolled out a suite of safeguards to address the criticism, including new restrictions on content for younger users and heftier parental controls. They pushed teens to make use of a tool that would nudge them to take a break if they were spending long periods scrolling and started blocking strangers from messaging teens on Instagram and Facebook. The shifts have not dissuaded some critics of the platforms potential harms.
“Instagram enjoyed this status as being both tremendously popular but also sort of charmed and kind of cool,” said Max Willens, a principal analyst with the analytics firm eMarketer. “It’s safe to say that that charmed period is over and what’s left instead is a lot of scrutiny — a kind of pervasive sense that their product is maybe not that good for young people.”
Meta did not dispute the details of its campaign to reach young users, but it rejects any implication that these initiatives “[stand] in contrast to our well-documented safety efforts,” company spokesman Ryan Daniels said in a statement. “We’ve released features like Teen Accounts and revamped them to be inspired by 13+ movie ratings — despite the fact this resulted in lower teen usage — because it’s the right thing to do for teens and parents.”
Meta promoted safety tools including its 2024 debut of Teen Accounts, a suite of settings for adolescent users that impose tougher restrictions on their interactions with other users and the content they view on Instagram, while giving parents more visibility and control over their online activity. Meta bought advertisements and paid digital personalities and celebrities such as Jessica Alba to tout the new tools to their fanbases. Company leaders also promoted the tools at in-person “Screen Smart” events for parenting and family influencers and in interviews with journalists at mainstream news outlets.
“We’ve really decided that parents should be our North Star,” Instagram’s Mosseri told “Good Morning America” last year. “They’ve been clear on what they are most concerned about and we’re trying to proactively address those concerns.”
The internal documents portray a company intent on reengineering Instagram to stem its faltering appeal among teens — including boosting their messaging activity on the platform — and to set up an early pipeline for lifelong use of Meta’s platforms.
As it rolled out new safety features, Instagram had a good reason to push hard to win back teens. After rising during pandemic-era lockdowns, by 2023 early teen sign ups Instagram had dropped by 20 to 30 percent, according to a research report from that year obtained in a separate trove of internal documents.
Instagram struggled to retain teens, in part, because they had difficulty finding friends there, according to the report, though social connection was supposed to drive their interest. Instagram also failed to produce the kind of sticky, trendy content from influencers that drew in teens, according to the internal documents.
“Teens don’t use IG because they don’t have compelling reasons to use it over competitors,” the 2023 report offered as one of several hypotheses.
Meta’s approach to reaching teens has often evolved based on its competitors’ activities, said Sam Saliba, a former global brand marketing lead for Instagram. After the messaging app Snapchat took off among teens, Instagram launched Stories in 2016 to offer users similar ephemeral photos and videos. Four years later, it launched Reels, a short-form video feature designed to compete for younger users against TikTok.
Getting teens onto Instagram, Saliba said, was seen as a means to introduce them to Meta’s other social media products.
“If they might start with Instagram or even Messenger Kids, and then maybe they graduate from college and then they’ll set up a Facebook account,” he said. “The idea was to have [different] services … depending on where people are in their life cycle.”
The temporary museums the company installed at some of its U.S. offices were meant to familiarize employees with teens’ cultural tastes and illustrate what life is like for adolescents all over the world, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private company matters. One version showcased the typical schedule of a teen in different countries, and the top 15 Instagram accounts teens were most likely to share, according to photos viewed by The Post.
It also asked employees to “roll a die” to choose a selfie style to take of themselves and post to an internal messaging group called “IG Teen Empathy Week,” the photos show. The options included a “0.5 Selfie,” in which teens set the camera to an ultra wide lens to take a distorted photo, an extremely close up shot, “uglycore,” in which teens made a “goofy/funny/‘ugly’ face” and an upside down or sideways photo “just cuz,” according to the photos.
‘A lot needs to go right’
By late 2023, Instagram knew it had a problem with teens. The number of them using the platform every day in developed markets had dropped 3.9 percent and the number of monthly active teen users had dropped 8.4 percent in just one year, according to a November 2023 strategy document.
“A lot needs to go right to reach our stretch goal,” the document stated, referring to its objective of halting these declines by the end of 2024.
To reverse the losses, Instagram leaders settled on five major goals for the first half of 2024: growth fundamentals, recommendations, Threads, friend sharing, and creators. Success for all but one of those goals, Threads, would be measured by how it affected teens’ use of Instagram, documents show.
“We expect all Instagram teams to take on teen metric goals or ask that teams take bigger swings to get teens talking about Instagram,” senior Instagram leaders wrote in a memo in September 2023.
By then, Instagram already had some success engaging teens with “Notes,” short text messages on top of users’ profile pictures that disappear after 24 hours. But Instagram leaders surmised the company would need two or three more product wins to reverse the decline in teen users by the end of 2024, according to the memo.
They shifted the company’s marketing budget to show teens how “Instagram provides small moments that lead to big friendships,” according to a late 2023 strategy document. Instagram also planned to improve friend recommendations, having pinpointed “early friending” as the strongest predictor of retaining new teen accounts and that 60 percent of teen users didn’t friend anyone on their first day on the app. They planned to more prominently show users content from their most important friends.
But they also needed to improve Instagram’s content, which sometimes featured trends a week or two after they surfaced on TikTok, according to the 2023 strategy document. Teens still named either TikTok or YouTube as their “preferred app for entertainment,” it noted. In response, Meta planned to improve its ranking system to distribute posts from creators producing “great content” faster, and use artificial intelligence to let creators better engage with fans in comments and direct messages, according to the strategy document.
“We believe we mitigate a substantial portion of teen decline if we make our core growth levers as effective as competitors (e.g. YouTube and TikTok),” the document said.
The company’s internal studies, some of which were later turned over to Congress, informed these strategies.
One June 2023 study highlighted that Gen Z and Gen Alpha adolescents were less inclined to share about their lives to their broad personal networks. Though people often share different sides of themselves to different groups, on social media those networks “collapse” into one place, the study said, leading young people to reject the pressure to share. These teens found people who shared too much were “cringey,” “messy,” or “vain,” according to the study.
In December 2023, researchers identified four categories of teen who had not yet joined the site. “Social expanders” were teens willing to connect with acquaintances and who enjoyed mainstream interests such as music, sports, and school gossip, while “private pals” had mainstream interests but a small group of friends.
“Subculture seekers” were driven by niche interests, including more unconventional topics such as cosplay. By contrast, “virtual hobbyists” spend time alone or with one or two friends and have niche interests such as insects, world building games and flight simulators.
Researchers decided that the teens that fell into the “social expanders” or “private pals” — who made up 55 percent of younger teens in the United States who had never joined Instagram — were the easiest groups to reach.
By June 2024, the company was still behind on its goals. Only 20 percent of teens who didn’t use Instagram considered joining the social network, and many teens still associated the app with the “pressure to be perfect,” according to a different strategy document from that month.
That month, Instagram leaders promoted a new plan for the second half on the year, expanding on the strategies it developed earlier in the year. The platform’s employees brainstormed new product launches that might appeal to teens, including giving users the ability to leave notes for their friends on more surfaces “so that watching Reels feels like hanging out,” as the document put it. The app also planned to incubate a new “friend map” to expand teens’ ability to share social media posts with their personal network, according to the document.
The company’s long-term goals were ambitious, according to a mid-2024 strategy document. By 2026, it wanted teens to prefer Instagram over TikTok in the United States and globally; by 2027, it wanted Instagram to become “the largest teen platform” around the world.
Despite these efforts, documents show that the company concluded the number of teens using Instagram had declined compared to 2024, and this spring said it would also start tracking young adults to “evaluate a shift towards young adults in 2026.”
Still, the company continues to promote Instagram as a safe app for teens, and one their parents can trust. In October, Mosseri went on “Today”to discuss the company’s application of PG-13 movie rating standards to Teen Accounts. When asked whether Instagram prioritized keeping teen users engaged over keeping them safe, Mosseri defended Instagram’s approach.
“Our responsibility,” he said, “is to maximize positive experiences and minimize negative experiences.”
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