Meta Continues to Refine How Teens Experience Ads Across Its Apps

Meta is making further changes to the way teens experience advertising on its platforms and giving people in that age group more specific controls and resources to better understand why they are seeing certain ads on its applications.

The company explained in a Newsroom post Tuesday, “We recognize that teens aren’t necessarily as equipped as adults to make decisions about how their online data is used for advertising, particularly when it comes to showing them products available to purchase. For that reason, we’re further restricting the options advertisers have to reach teens, as well as the information we use to show ads to teens.”

Starting in February, gender will be removed as an option for advertisers to reach teens, and teens’ engagement on Meta’s apps—such as with pages on Facebook or posts on Instagram—will not be used to inform the ads they see.

Meta said the only information about teens it will use to show them ads is age and location, in order to ensure that teens see age-appropriate ads and products and services that are available where they live.

Starting in March, Ad Topic Controls will give teens more ways to manage the types of ads they see on Facebook and Instagram, enabling them to go to their Ad Preferences within settings on both apps and choose “See Less” or “No Preference.”

The company explained, “Our advertising standards already prohibit ads about restricted topics—like alcohol, financial products and weight loss products and services—to be shown to people under 18 (and older in certain countries). But even when an ad complies with our policies, teens may want to see fewer ads like it. For example, if a teen wants to see fewer ads about a genre of TV show or an upcoming sports season, they should be able to tell us that.”

Teens can continue to choose to hide any or all ads from a specific advertiser.

Topics already restricted by the company’s policies will be defaulted to See Less to prevent teens from seeing content that may not be age-appropriate.

Finally, Meta added a new privacy page with more information for teens about the tools and privacy settings available across our technologies, and its teen privacy center now has additional resources to help teens understand and manage their privacy across its family of apps.