Meta has long been concerned about losing teens and young adults to rivals like TikTok and Snapchat, especially since advertisers are so coveted of that audience. Facebook, which Mark Zuckerberg created in 2004 while at Harvard, was aimed at college students in its early years but has struggled in recent years with an aging user base.
Last year, 17 percent of Facebook users were between the ages of 18 and 24, compared with 44 percent who were over the age of 45, according to Data.ai, an analytics company. In contrast, 28 percent of Instagram users were between the ages of 18 and 24 and 33 percent were over 45, while 39 percent of Snapchat users and 30 percent of TikTok users they were between 18 and 24 years old.
To appeal to younger users, Instagram and Facebook have in recent years introduced features like Stories, which emulates a Snapchat feature by allowing people to post photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours. They also launched Reels, a TikTok-like feature that allows people to create short videos.
Last year, Instagram engineers were told that Meta wanted more people to post from Instagram to Facebook, said three people involved in the project, who were not authorized to speak publicly. That led to the new notice, which was designed for most users to give Instagram permission to permanently share their posts with Facebook, they said. The indicator was placed where thumbs would normally land on a screen, one of the people said.
Meta declined to comment on what had led to the message and its design. But the company said not all Instagram users received the prompt and acknowledged that some had to opt out multiple times before Instagram stopped asking. Meta also said that a software bug last year caused some users to see the notice every time they posted on Instagram.
“We know that people enjoy cross-posting content to easily share with their friends and followers through our apps,” a spokeswoman for Meta, which also owns WhatsApp and Messenger, said in a statement.
Tech companies have long encouraged users to stay with their services by modifying their products, said Tony Hu, who teaches product design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One example is pop-up windows that people click once to accept all Internet cookies, which collect their data and track them online, he said. Another is how Amazon made it easy to buy items with a single click, he said.
