For Meta, children were a target market to be cornered, not a vulnerable group needing to be protected with age restrictions
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg leaves a court in Los Angeles, California, on Feb. 18, 2026, after testifying in a lawsuit regarding teen social media addiction. (AFP/Yonhap)
“If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens.”
That sentence is a direct quote from a 2018 internal document from Meta, which owns Instagram.
The document was submitted by the plaintiff as evidence in the K.G.M. v. Meta et al. case, which ended in a landmark ruling ordering companies to compensate teens with social media addictions.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the defendant of this case, testified in court that he did not “remember the context of [that] email.”
Other pieces of evidence exist. Meta claims that Instagram’s regulations prevent those under 13 from making accounts. However, the platform is full of videos featuring children who state that they’re younger than 13 while using social media.
In particular, the trend of uploading videos of themselves singing along to “Some Things About Me,” which starts with “My name, my age, my favorite color,” was widely popular amongst children between the ages of 7 and 8.
On the surface, social media companies adhere to age verification laws, preventing people who are too young from holding accounts, but the actual verification process is incredibly faulty. Users can make accounts by lying about their age or using a one-time verification process.
This explains why some suspect that companies are deliberately ignoring loopholes to corner the teen market, as stated in Meta’s internal document.
Countries around the world are attempting to prevent social media addiction in children and teens with two-track regulations: age verification laws and disabling addictive designs based on the users’ age.
The regulations mentioned by the Korea Media and Communications Commission during an operational report chaired by Korean President Lee Jae Myung on July 16 are also a mixed model that blocks children under 14 from creating accounts and limits addictive designs for users under 19.
However, issues are prevalent in Australia, which implemented that model in 2025, as children and teens create fake accounts to bypass age restrictions.
In response to possible loopholes, France will require people to submit a cryptographic token verifying one’s age, which will be generated by providing one’s ID, and holding social media companies to higher standards when it comes to age verification issues.
The state of California enacted a law at the beginning of this year that requires operating system providers to collect age information from users at device account setup.
This demonstrates that, globally, we are heading in a direction to ensure that companies are responsible for developing technology to verify their users’ actual ages.
By Shin Da-eun, staff reporter
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