"Teens are still developing self control. They are motivated by the prospect of immediate rewards... We must find ways to make teens feel more productive and rewarded on our platform."

Internal documentUndated
"The teen brain is easily stimulated by novelty, making discovery surfaces very engaging if the content is fresh." "Redundancy is a buzzkill. We must make deduping content across surfaces a priority for the teen audience. We also need to provide more opportunities to help teens discover new content, interests and people." "Teens are prime to exploration and learning. Interests, conversations and sharing new experiences are top exploration tasks for teenagers." "Exploration is currently a shallow pool on IG. We need to better facilitate deep dives into interests and conversation by leveraging IGTV and further facilitating community. We should also be striving to spearhead innovative interactions that create new shared experiences." "Teens are still developing self control. They are motivated by the prospect of immediate rewards." "Teens are not finding enough value to the proportion of time they are spending on IG. We must find ways to make teens feel more productive and rewarded on our platform." "Teens are sensitive and vulnerable to experiences that can have lasting harm." "We should continue to seek ways to prevent negative experiences and hurt feelings on the platform. We should also invest in an education experience to teach teens how to protect themselves from dangers on IG." "Emotion, the intrigue of novelty and the prospect of reward are the drivers behind teens' decisions and behavior." "The teenage brain is usually about 80% mature. The remaining 20% rests in the frontal cortex - the area of the brain responsible for planning, judgement and foresight. So teens are highly dependent on the temporal lobe of the brain where emotions, memory and learning, and the reward system reign supreme." "'Identity Moratorium' -- Teens engage in a high level of exploration with a low level of commitment, which is called 'Identity Moratorium.' Those that do so successfully leave with a sense of who they are." "'Imaginary Audience' -- Personal fable is compounded by another psychological concept called 'imaginary audience', which is a heightened self consciousness fueled by the belief that all eyes are on them. This proves true in the data as well. At least in the U.S., teens are much more concerned about the quality of their content and have concerns about being judged. It's no wonder then why there are so many public sharing barriers and rules among teenagers even on ephemeral surfaces like Stories." "Negative Experiences. There is quite a bit of threat to be wary of especially among teens on Instagram, 7% report experiencing bullying on IG and most notably in DM (40% of bullying experiences are reported in DM). Unsurprisingly, people being bullied on IG are more likely to delete or deactivate their accounts." "Lastly a huge driver for teen behavior is the prospect of reward. This is what makes them predisposed to impulse, peer pressure, and potentially harmful risky behavior like drugs, stunts and pranks." "Teen brains are much more sensitive to dopamine, one of the reasons that the risk of drug addiction is higher for adolescents and it's the same thing that keeps them scrolling and scrolling. Due to the immature brain, they have a much harder time stopping even though they want to -- our own product foundation research has shown teens are unhappy with the amount of time they spend on our app." "And sadly, a short term reward and inexperience makes teens prone to risky behavior and there are plenty that present themselves online and on Instagram. This could be engaging with predators, consuming dark content, sharing nude photos or copycat self-harm."
— Unnamed employee