Facebook built an app called Bell for teenagers but never launched it, court records show

In 2018, as Facebook wanted to expand its global presence, the company thought of launching a different youth application called Bell, which would be built around their high schools, providing platforms where students could discuss sports teams, school events or what they heard in the hall, a new court show.

The company intends for Bell to be the primary center for high school youth across the United States and eventually the world, where they will be able to connect with their classmates but not anyone outside of their school. The plan was to draw young people into the company’s ecosystem and move them into Facebook’s familiar environment once they graduated, according to a redacted April 2018 internal filing, which was filed in federal court last week.

“Communication at the high school is important for the youth and it is important for us to win,” the presentation said.

Although Bell’s app never launched, internal plans show the importance Facebook placed on “successful” users before they turned 18, laying the groundwork for keeping them with products over time.

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A spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said the app was built as an early testing idea, and would have relied heavily on Facebook’s testing teams to verify content. A spokesperson did not respond to a question about why the app was not launched.

Bell’s plans were included among dozens of exhibits filed late Friday by plaintiffs as part of an ongoing lawsuit against major social media companies, including Meta. Hundreds of individual families, school districts and 33 state attorneys general are accusing Meta, Google, ByteDance and Snap of designing addictive social media products and promoting them to children, despite knowing about research showing children’s brain damage.

“Social media addiction tests provide a look behind the curtain and prove that the situation was worse than we thought,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, a nonprofit advocacy group that pushes for more regulation of digital technology companies. “We must do more to protect children.”

Meta and other companies have widely argued that there is no firmly established link between social media use and mental health problems, and that the platforms had no duty to warn the public of potential dangers.

“We strongly disagree with these allegations and we hope that the evidence will show our commitment to supporting young people,” Meta said in a statement. “For more than a decade we have been listening to parents, working with experts and law enforcement, and doing extensive research to understand the most important issues.”

Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, last week argued in a Los Angeles court that people stay on the company’s platforms because they find them useful for connecting with peers. Meta has developed better age-recognition systems over the years, the company says, in an effort to prevent children under 13 from accessing its platforms.

A Meta spokesperson pointed to features in its New Accounts that are intended to give parents more control over their children’s social media, and encourage new users to take a break and stop notifications overnight.

Meta has considered launching platforms aimed at children for the past decade. It has halted plans to make a version of Instagram for under-13s in 2021 following pushback from parental safety groups. It also considered creating a version of Facebook for kids in 2017, but decided against it after parents reported it gave negative feedback.

Facebook’s 2018 presentation at Bell shows how young users could send a message to anyone in their school, organize events on the platform and create group or group discussions similar to Discord and Slack applications. Students would also be able to post confessions anonymously, similar to the app YikYak, and Bell would integrate with education technology products, such as Google Classroom.

When the youth graduated from high school, according to an internal presentation, Bell would have provided a “smooth way” for them to enter their information on Facebook. The information that Bell collected from students will later influence what appears in their Facebook feed.

An internal presentation cited surveys of high school students who identified “must-haves” in a social media app: connecting with classmates, watching videos and memes created by students and staying up to date with what’s going on at their high school. Some of this has already happened in Facebook Groups and Messenger, and Snapchat, but the company saw an opening to create a single application that “gathers everyone at school in one closed campus.”

The company hopes that the Bell app will reach 80% of US high schools by the end of 2020 and expand to Australia, Canada and European countries.

Late last year, Australia enacted a law banning children under the age of 16 from using social media.