Recently released documents show the big business opportunity that social media companies saw in recruiting teens to their platforms and how they discussed risks that heavy digital engagement could pose.
The documents were released last week as part of a major set of trials brought by school districts, state attorneys general, and others against Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube, alleging the design of their products harmed young users. The Tech Oversight Project, which advocates for more regulations on tech platforms to safeguard teens online, compiled a report on the newly released documents, which were independently reviewed by The Verge. On Monday, a federal judge will hear arguments that will determine the scope of the trials, the first of which kicks off in June.
The internal documents produced as part of the litigation show that social media companies recognized business value in establishing users at a young age. But they also show how the companies tracked harmful effects that features could have on those users and considered ways to address those risks. The companies have all expressed a commitment to safeguarding teens on their platforms and generally complained that evidence presented by the plaintiffs lacks relevant context. Meta, for example, launched a webpage that responds to FAQs about the litigation and lists research that describes the other factors impacting teens’ mental health, or finding minimal association between teens’ use of digital platforms and their mental well-being.
Some emails and slides demonstrate just how valuable some of the companies saw teen users for growing their business. “Mark [Zuckerberg] has decided that the top priority for the company in H1 2017 is teens,” a redacted sender said in an email to Meta’s then-growth executive Guy Rosen with the subject line “FYI: Teen Growth!!” at the end of 2016. It later discussed a teen ambassador program for Instagram and considered formalizing teens’ tendency to make Finstas by introducing a private mode for Facebook that drew on what teens liked about making alternative Instagram accounts: “smaller audiences, plausible deniability, and private accounts.”
“Solving Kids is a Massive Opportunity,” the title of a November 2020 slide from Google said, citing that “Kids under 13 are the fastest-growing Internet audience in the world.” Its internal research found family users “lead to better retention and more overall value.” The company recognized that getting students to use Chromebooks in school made them more likely to consider buying Google products down the road. Google spokesperson Jack Malon told The Verge in a previous statement that “YouTube does not market directly to schools and we have responded to meet the strong demand from educators for high-quality, curriculum-aligned content.”
“Solving Kids is a Massive Opportunity”
Some of the companies discussed the PR risks involved in having young users on their platforms. Emails from 2016 show Meta discussing public perception and safety risks around the launch of its short-lived under-21 app Lifestage. Employees weighed the potential risks of giving administrators at the high schools where it planned to launch a heads-up, versus the potential to ruin the “‘cool’ factor” of the app by cluing them in. One raised a concern about how tricky it would be to know if only actual teens were on the app. “[W]e can’t enforce against impersonation/predators/press if we don’t have a way to verify accounts.” In a February 2018 document, Meta recognized it may have to delay letting tweens on Facebook because of “increased scrutiny of whether Facebook is good for Youth.”
A 2018 deck produced by Google titled “Digital Wellness Overview – YT Autoplay” notes that “Tech addiction and Google’s role has been making the news and has gained prominence since ‘time well spent’ movement started.” It said that autoplay may be “disrupting sleep patterns” and suggested limiting it at night could help (autoplay is now turned off for kids under 18).
The companies were aware of research and anecdotes describing kids using their platforms below the age they should be allowed to, or at times they shouldn’t. A 2017 study commissioned by Snap found 64 percent of users 13-21 used it in school. In a highly redacted chat log from February 2020 produced from TikTok’s records, one person in the chat said they’re “sort of glad” that news crews ended up not being able to make it to a public event where students on the panel they were watching were “primarily under 13” and discussing “how they know they’re not supposed to have an account.”
But the documents also show the ways the companies considered the unique challenges their younger users would face on their platforms and discussed how to mitigate them. A March 2023 slide deck from Snap describes a recent study it worked on “to understand the perceptions of social media from Users, Parents’ and Wellness Experts in order to identify new opportunities to foster positive interactions on and perceptions of Snapchat.” After finding many teens reported being on social media “all the time,” the company suggested considering letting users turn off social media during school hours, or setting their own time limits in the app. “From the beginning, Snap considered how time, content, and online interactions influence real-life relationships,” Snap spokesperson Monique Bellamy said in a statement. “We deliberately designed Snapchat to create a unique experience that encourages self-expression, visual communication, and authentic, real-time conversations, rather than promoting endless passive consumption.”
A 2021 document from TikTok recognized that compulsive use of its platform was “rampant,” but said that meant it needed to provide users “better tools to understand their usage, manage it effectively, and ensure being on TikTok is time well spent.” The company saw it as a good thing that TikTok users were more actively engaged on their app than on other platforms, since “research suggests passive use of social media is more harmful.” TikTok did not immediately provide a comment on the latest document release.
In the 2016 email to Meta’s Rosen, the redacted sender wrote that the goal was to emphasize “teen:teen connections” and they wanted to find a way “for teens newly joining FB to indicate whether a person who they are friending is or is not a peer (aka another teen).” They also added that Meta was “heavily investing in improving our ability to model actual age of teens.”
Some safeguards may actually be good for business, executives sometimes suggested. Google, in a 2019 document, proposed disincentivizing “growth that doesn’t support wellbeing,” recognizing that investing in users’ digital well-being would be positive for its brand and “a more sustainable path for growth.”
Source link
#Internal #chats #show #social #media #companies #discussed #teen #engagement
![Sam Altman’s project World looks to scale its human verification empire. First stop: Tinder. | TechCrunch
At a trendy venue near the San Francisco pier, Sam Altman’s verification project World celebrated its next evolution and rapid expansion of its ambitions. And it’s starting with Tinder.
Tools for Humanity (TFH), the company behind the World project, announced Friday plans to integrate its verification tech into dating apps, event and concert ticketing systems, business organizations, email, and other arenas of public life.
“The world is getting close to very powerful AI, and this is doing a lot of wonderful things,” said Altman, speaking before a packed crowd at The Midway. “We are also heading to a world now where there’s going to be more stuff generated by AI than by humans,” he added. “I’m sure many of you [have had moments] where you’re like, ‘Am I interacting with an AI or a person, or how much of each, and how do I know?”
World (formerly Worldcoin) distinguishes itself from many of its ID verification peers by offering the ability to verify that a real, living human is using a digital service while still protecting that person’s anonymity. There is some complex cryptographic alchemy behind this (something called “zero-knowledge proof-based authentication”). The upshot: The company is creating what it calls “proof of human” tools, which are mechanisms that can verify human activity in a world rife with AI agents and bots.
Its chief tool for verification is a spherical digital reader called the Orb that scans a user’s eyes, converting their iris into a unique and anonymous cryptographic identifier (known as a verified World ID). This can then be used to access World’s services, although users can also access World’s app without one.
Altman kept his remarks brief on Friday (TFH’s co-founder and CEO, Alex Blania, was absent due to a last-minute hand surgery, Altman said). He then turned much of the presentation over to World’s chief product officer, Tiago Sada, and his team.
Sada explained that World was launching the newest version of its app (the last version was launched at an event in December), along with a plethora of new integrations for its technology.
World has been preparing, for some time, to deploy a verification service for dating apps — most notably, Tinder. Last year, Tinder launched a World ID pilot program in Japan. That pilot was apparently a success because World announced that Tinder would be launching its verification integration in global markets —including the U.S. The program integrates a World ID emblem into the profiles of users who have gone through its verification processes, thus authenticating them as a real person.
Image Credits:World
World is also courting the entertainment industry by launching a new feature called Concert Kit, where musical artists can reserve a certain number of concert tickets for World ID-verified humans. This is designed to ensure that fans are safe from scalpers who often use automated ticket-buying bots to scarf up seats. Concert Kit is compatible with major ticketing systems, including Ticketmaster and Eventbrite, and the company is promoting it via partnerships with 30 Seconds to Mars and Bruno Mars — both of whom plan to use it for their upcoming tours.
The event was full of many other announcements, including some aimed at businesses. A Zoom/World ID verification integration seeks to battle a supposed deepfake threat to business calls, and a Docusign partnership is designed to ensure signatures come from authentic users.
The company is also working on a number of features in anticipation of the Wild West of the agentic web, including one called “agent delegation,” in which a person can delegate their World ID to an agent to carry out online activities on their behalf. A partnership with authentication firm Okta has also created a system (currently in beta) that verifies that an agent is acting on behalf of a human. The system is set up so that a World ID can be tied to a specific agent and then, when the agent goes out into the web to operate on that person’s behalf, websites will know a verified person is behind the behavior, said Okta’s chief product officer, Gareth Davies, at the event.
So far, it’s been difficult for World to scale, due largely to the verification process itself. For much of the company’s history, to get its gold standard, you had to travel to one of its offices and have your eyeballs scanned by an Orb — a fairly inconvenient (not to mention weird) experience.
Image Credits:World
However, World has continually made moves to increase the ease and incentive structure for verification. In the past, it offered its crypto asset, Worldcoin, to some members who signed up and has distributed its Orbs into big retail chains so that users can verify themselves while they’re out shopping or getting a coffee. Now the company is announcing that it is significantly expanding its Orb saturation in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The company also promoted a service where interested users could have World bring an Orb to their location for remote verification.
In a conversation with TechCrunch, Sada also shared that World has attempted to solve the scaling problem by creating different tiers of verification. The highest tier is Orb verification, but below that, World has previously offered a mid-level tier, which uses an anonymized scan of an official government ID via the card’s NFC chip.
The company also introduced a low-level tier, or what Sada called “low friction”— meaning low effort, I guess, but also “low security” — which involves merely taking a selfie.
Selfie Check, which Sada’s team presented during the event, is designed to maintain user privacy.
“Selfie is private by design,” said Daniel Shorr, one of TFH’s executives, during the presentation. “That means that we maximize the local processing that’s happening on your device, on your phone, which means that your images are yours.”
Selfie verification obviously isn’t new, and fraudsters have long managed to spoof it. “Obviously, we do our best, and it’s like one of the best systems that you’ll see for this. But it has limits,” Sada told TechCrunch. Developers looking to integrate World’s services can choose from the three different verification tiers depending on the level of security that’s important to them, he noted.
#Sam #Altmans #project #World #scale #human #verification #empire #stop #Tinder #TechCrunchDocuSign,sam altman,Tinder,World,Worldcoin,zoom Sam Altman’s project World looks to scale its human verification empire. First stop: Tinder. | TechCrunch
At a trendy venue near the San Francisco pier, Sam Altman’s verification project World celebrated its next evolution and rapid expansion of its ambitions. And it’s starting with Tinder.
Tools for Humanity (TFH), the company behind the World project, announced Friday plans to integrate its verification tech into dating apps, event and concert ticketing systems, business organizations, email, and other arenas of public life.
“The world is getting close to very powerful AI, and this is doing a lot of wonderful things,” said Altman, speaking before a packed crowd at The Midway. “We are also heading to a world now where there’s going to be more stuff generated by AI than by humans,” he added. “I’m sure many of you [have had moments] where you’re like, ‘Am I interacting with an AI or a person, or how much of each, and how do I know?”
World (formerly Worldcoin) distinguishes itself from many of its ID verification peers by offering the ability to verify that a real, living human is using a digital service while still protecting that person’s anonymity. There is some complex cryptographic alchemy behind this (something called “zero-knowledge proof-based authentication”). The upshot: The company is creating what it calls “proof of human” tools, which are mechanisms that can verify human activity in a world rife with AI agents and bots.
Its chief tool for verification is a spherical digital reader called the Orb that scans a user’s eyes, converting their iris into a unique and anonymous cryptographic identifier (known as a verified World ID). This can then be used to access World’s services, although users can also access World’s app without one.
Altman kept his remarks brief on Friday (TFH’s co-founder and CEO, Alex Blania, was absent due to a last-minute hand surgery, Altman said). He then turned much of the presentation over to World’s chief product officer, Tiago Sada, and his team.
Sada explained that World was launching the newest version of its app (the last version was launched at an event in December), along with a plethora of new integrations for its technology.
World has been preparing, for some time, to deploy a verification service for dating apps — most notably, Tinder. Last year, Tinder launched a World ID pilot program in Japan. That pilot was apparently a success because World announced that Tinder would be launching its verification integration in global markets —including the U.S. The program integrates a World ID emblem into the profiles of users who have gone through its verification processes, thus authenticating them as a real person.
Image Credits:World
World is also courting the entertainment industry by launching a new feature called Concert Kit, where musical artists can reserve a certain number of concert tickets for World ID-verified humans. This is designed to ensure that fans are safe from scalpers who often use automated ticket-buying bots to scarf up seats. Concert Kit is compatible with major ticketing systems, including Ticketmaster and Eventbrite, and the company is promoting it via partnerships with 30 Seconds to Mars and Bruno Mars — both of whom plan to use it for their upcoming tours.
The event was full of many other announcements, including some aimed at businesses. A Zoom/World ID verification integration seeks to battle a supposed deepfake threat to business calls, and a Docusign partnership is designed to ensure signatures come from authentic users.
The company is also working on a number of features in anticipation of the Wild West of the agentic web, including one called “agent delegation,” in which a person can delegate their World ID to an agent to carry out online activities on their behalf. A partnership with authentication firm Okta has also created a system (currently in beta) that verifies that an agent is acting on behalf of a human. The system is set up so that a World ID can be tied to a specific agent and then, when the agent goes out into the web to operate on that person’s behalf, websites will know a verified person is behind the behavior, said Okta’s chief product officer, Gareth Davies, at the event.
So far, it’s been difficult for World to scale, due largely to the verification process itself. For much of the company’s history, to get its gold standard, you had to travel to one of its offices and have your eyeballs scanned by an Orb — a fairly inconvenient (not to mention weird) experience.
Image Credits:World
However, World has continually made moves to increase the ease and incentive structure for verification. In the past, it offered its crypto asset, Worldcoin, to some members who signed up and has distributed its Orbs into big retail chains so that users can verify themselves while they’re out shopping or getting a coffee. Now the company is announcing that it is significantly expanding its Orb saturation in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The company also promoted a service where interested users could have World bring an Orb to their location for remote verification.
In a conversation with TechCrunch, Sada also shared that World has attempted to solve the scaling problem by creating different tiers of verification. The highest tier is Orb verification, but below that, World has previously offered a mid-level tier, which uses an anonymized scan of an official government ID via the card’s NFC chip.
The company also introduced a low-level tier, or what Sada called “low friction”— meaning low effort, I guess, but also “low security” — which involves merely taking a selfie.
Selfie Check, which Sada’s team presented during the event, is designed to maintain user privacy.
“Selfie is private by design,” said Daniel Shorr, one of TFH’s executives, during the presentation. “That means that we maximize the local processing that’s happening on your device, on your phone, which means that your images are yours.”
Selfie verification obviously isn’t new, and fraudsters have long managed to spoof it. “Obviously, we do our best, and it’s like one of the best systems that you’ll see for this. But it has limits,” Sada told TechCrunch. Developers looking to integrate World’s services can choose from the three different verification tiers depending on the level of security that’s important to them, he noted.
#Sam #Altmans #project #World #scale #human #verification #empire #stop #Tinder #TechCrunchDocuSign,sam altman,Tinder,World,Worldcoin,zoom](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-17-at-1.55.00-PM.png?w=680)






Post Comment