Facebook says it has restructured its “youth team” of 100+, will increase its investment in Messenger Kids, and that the meme app LOL will be shuttered
Facebook is restructuring its “youth team,” shutting down its new teen meme app LOL, and doubling down on Messenger Kids.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's youth strategy has been a scattergun of experiments: code for a teen messaging app called Talk surfaced in mid-2017, and Messenger Kids launched on iOS that December as a standalone, parent-approved chat app for under-13s. Weeks ago it confirmed it was testing LOL, a meme feed pulled from top meme Pages.
Now the portfolio is being pruned: LOL is dead after barely a month of testing, while the 100+ person youth team is restructured and resources shift toward Messenger Kids — a signal Facebook sees controlled, parent-mediated messaging, not viral content apps, as its path to younger users.
First-order effects
- The LOL experiment ends weeks after its January test began, pulling the app from the small audience it had and freeing the Pages-and-memes feed effort's resources.
- Messenger Kids gets more engineering and product investment as the surviving centerpiece of the restructured youth team.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's experimentation cadence tightens further: following earlier consolidations like folding Messenger Day into Facebook Stories, marginal youth products now face faster kill decisions when they don't stick.
- Top meme Pages lose one emerging distribution surface for their content, concentrating their reach back into News Feed and Instagram.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Facebook's under-13 push consolidates around a single moderated, parental-consent product rather than a fleet of experimental apps — making Messenger Kids the company's structural answer to serving minors without exposing them to the main network.
The trend: Facebook is narrowing its youth strategy from many small experiments to fewer, longer-horizon bets, with Messenger Kids as the anchor.