In November 2023, 33 state attorneys general filed a bombshell lawsuit against Meta, accusing the company of deliberately getting adolescents addicted to Instagram and Facebook while knowing its platforms jeopardized their safety.
Two weeks later, Instagram head Adam Mosseri sent an internal memo to his staff. The message was clear: double down on teenagers.
“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 November 6, 2023 memo.
Internal documents from 2023 to 2025, obtained and reported by The Washington Post in late December, reveal the memo was just one piece of a multi-year strategy to reverse Instagram’s declining appeal among teenagers—even as the company publicly insisted it was making parents its “North Star.”
The documents paint a picture of a company facing an existential crisis: losing the demographic that determines whether it remains culturally relevant.
The Problem Instagram Was Trying to Solve
Behind the scenes, Instagram was bleeding teenage users.
After a pandemic-era surge, early teen sign-ups had dropped 20 to 30 percent by 2023, according to internal research. Daily active teen users in developed markets fell 3.9 percent year-over-year, while monthly active users dropped 8.4 percent.
For a platform built on being where young people are, these numbers spelled trouble.
The research identified why: teenagers were having difficulty finding friends on Instagram. Social connection was supposed to drive their interest, but 60 percent of teen users didn’t add a single friend on their first day using the app. Without that early “friending,” teens simply didn’t stick around.
Meanwhile, competitors like TikTok were winning. Instagram’s content often featured trends a week or two after they surfaced on TikTok, making the platform feel dated to teenagers who prize being first to discover what’s new.
A November 2023 strategy document acknowledged the challenge: “A lot needs to go right to reach our stretch goal,” referring to Instagram’s objective of halting teen user declines by the end of 2024.
Instagram’s Five-Point Plan
To reverse the losses, Instagram leadership 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 specifically by how it affected teenagers’ use of Instagram.
“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 September 2023 memo.
The documents show Instagram staffers considered boosting teen metrics their top priority for 2024—ranking even above building out Threads, Meta’s breakout rival to X (formerly Twitter).
Friend recommendations: Instagram pinpointed “early friending” as the strongest predictor of retaining new teen accounts. They planned to improve recommendations and more prominently display content from users’ closest friends.
Faster trends: Recognising Instagram was consistently behind TikTok on emerging content, the company worked to speed up how quickly trends appeared on the platform.
Product features: Instagram had already found success with “Notes”—short text messages that appear on profile pictures and disappear after 24 hours. Leaders determined they would need “two or three more product wins” like Notes to meaningfully reverse declines.
Marketing budget: Instagram shifted spending to show teenagers how “Instagram provides small moments that lead to big friendships,” according to a late 2023 strategy document.
Messaging: The plan included boosting teenagers’ messaging activity on Instagram, recognising this kept users more engaged with the platform.
The strategy wasn’t subtle. It was a company-wide mobilisation aimed at one objective: getting more teenagers onto Instagram and keeping them there longer.
The Public Message: “Parents Are Our North Star”
While Instagram pursued this aggressive teen growth strategy internally, the company’s public messaging told a different story.
“We’ve really decided that parents should be our North Star,” Mosseri told Good Morning America in 2024. “They’ve been clear on what they are most concerned about and we’re trying to proactively address those concerns.”
Throughout 2024, Meta rolled out a series of safety features positioned as protecting teenagers: Teen Accounts with default privacy settings, content restrictions on violence and self-harm, limits on who could message teens, and parental supervision tools.
The company announced these initiatives with considerable fanfare, framing them as evidence of Meta’s commitment to teen wellbeing.
Yet the internal documents reveal a more complex reality: Instagram was simultaneously rolling out safety features while aggressively engineering the platform to increase teen engagement—the very behaviour those safety features aimed to moderate.
Did It Work?
According to later internal assessments cited by Al Mayadeen, the strategy largely failed.
Despite algorithm changes, new features, and marketing adjustments, the share of teenage users on Instagram continued to fall in 2025 compared to the previous year.
In response, Meta is now considering a strategic pivot: shifting focus toward young adults aged roughly 18-29 beginning in 2026, essentially acknowledging that winning back teenagers may be a losing battle.
The documents don’t explain exactly why the strategy failed, but the broader context offers clues. Australia banned under-16s from social media in December 2025. Denmark, France, and Malaysia are pursuing similar age restrictions. US states including Virginia and Florida have enacted their own limitations.
Teenagers themselves may simply be moving on—not just from Instagram, but from the concept of public social platforms altogether. Research shows they’re increasingly communicating in private group chats and direct messages rather than posting to public feeds.
The Contradiction at Instagram’s Core
The leaked documents expose a fundamental tension in how social media platforms approach children and teenagers.
On one side: genuine concerns about teen mental health, pressure from regulators and parents, and lawsuits from 33 state attorneys general alleging the platforms cause addiction and harm.
On the other side: business imperatives. Teenagers represent future adult users. The younger someone starts using a platform, the more likely they are to remain lifelong users—what the internal documents describe as establishing “an early pipeline for lifelong use of Meta’s platforms.”
Instagram can’t afford to lose teenagers to competitors. But it also can’t afford the regulatory and legal backlash from being seen as targeting vulnerable young users.
The documents suggest Instagram tried to thread this needle by rolling out safety features while simultaneously pursuing growth. Whether that’s possible—whether a platform can genuinely protect teenagers while also maximising their engagement—is the central question raised by these revelations.
What This Means for Parents
The leaked documents don’t reveal anything illegal or necessarily improper. Companies routinely try to grow their user base, and focusing on teenagers—who often determine what’s culturally relevant—is standard practice for social platforms.
But the documents do reveal something important for parents to understand: when Instagram says it’s making parents its “North Star,” it’s telling only part of the story.
Instagram is, first and foremost, a business trying to grow. Teen users are valuable—not just as current users, but as future adult users. The company has a financial incentive to maximise teen engagement, even while implementing features meant to limit it.
This doesn’t make Instagram uniquely villainous. It makes Instagram like every other social media platform operating in a market economy: responsive to shareholders, competitors, and regulators, in roughly that order.
For parents, the lesson is straightforward: don’t assume platforms are looking out for your children’s best interests. They might implement helpful features. They might make genuine efforts to reduce harm. But at the end of the day, their business model depends on engagement—including from teenagers.
YouTube’s CEO, Meet Instagram’s Strategy
This story has echoes of another recent revelation.
In December 2025, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan admitted he restricts his own three children’s access to YouTube and other social platforms—”controlled and restricted” on weekdays, relaxed on weekends. He joins a pattern of tech executives (Susan Wojcicki, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Cuban) who privately impose strict limits on their own children while running platforms that encourage maximum engagement from everyone else’s.
Where Do We Go From Here?
The leaked Instagram documents arrive as regulatory pressure mounts. Australia implemented the world’s first under-16 social media ban. Denmark, France, Malaysia and Norway are pursuing similar restrictions. US states including Virginia and Florida have enacted their own laws, though most face legal challenges.
The documents raise a fundamental question: Can platforms built on maximising engagement ever truly prioritise user wellbeing?
Behind every internal memo prioritising teen metrics, behind every carefully worded public statement about safety features, there are millions of teenagers—and their families—trying to navigate platforms designed, first and foremost, to keep them scrolling.
The Bottom Line: Instagram publicly said parents were its North Star while privately telling staff to stay laser focused on recruiting teenagers. The documents don’t reveal wrongdoing, but they do reveal the tension at the heart of every social media platform: the conflict between engagement and wellbeing, between business goals and user safety, between what companies say and what they do.
Sources:
- Washington Post: Inside Meta, Instagram went all-in to win back teens (December 26, 2025)
- Al Mayadeen: Instagram’s teen growth push falters amid rising age restrictions (December 2025)
- DNyuz: Leaked documents show Instagram’s plan to win back teens (December 26, 2025)
- YPulse: Internal documents reveal Instagram is struggling to win back teens (December 30, 2025)
- iPhone in Canada: Instagram intensifies efforts to win back teens (December 26, 2025)
