In light of this, and given how much of the youth appeal seems to have vacated Facebook in favour of Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat, the focus for the app going forward appears a tad misaligned:
"As we think about the next 20 years, we're focused on two big things: building the next generation of social media for young adults and leaning into new product capabilities enabled by AI."

Facebook as the place to be for young adults? Really?
 
The statement comes from a post that Facebook published late last week which provides an overview of some of its key focal elements moving forward, as it looks to re-establish ties with the youth.
 
Or simply reinforce them.
 
As noted by Facebook:

Facebook remains everyone's service, but to evolve for the future of consumers, we transformed significantly with the young adult in mind. And with five quarters of healthy growth of young adult app usage in US/CA, over 40 million US/CA young adults are daily active users, and this number is the largest in three years.

Which is ironic, considering that a study last year by Pew Research found that Facebook lost much of its ground as the choice social app among younger users.
Pew reports:
"Facebook once dominated the social media landscape among America's youth, but the share of teens who use the site has dropped from 71% in 2014-2015 to 33% today."

So, while Facebook may have regained some of that popularity of late as you can see, is well behind these other apps and it's hard to see how it can regain that ground, given the reputational and habitual position that it now finds itself in.

But Facebook says that it is regaining youth interest.

How?

Marketplace – as Facebook portrays, young people can find great furniture deals on Marketplace, which is helpful for that all important lifestyle transition – like moving out of home
Reels – as Facebook portrays, Reels is becoming a popular destination for finding content of interest
Facebook Groups – FB Groups, of course, have long been a much deeper connective tissue in the Facebook profile, and Facebook reports that young users are now increasingly using groups to connect with local communities
Also, one you probably weren't ready for:

"Facebook Dating is continuing to see steady and strong daily active user growth, and is up +20% year-over-year with young adults in the United States and Canada."

Yes, Facebook Dating, which it first launched back in 2019, and hasn't really come out too loud and proud about since, is indeed still helping people match for dates, and interest is picking up in the U.S.

So, it's obvious that Facebook has some entry points for young users, even if its main news feed doesn't have the same appeal. However, it is pretty much practical use cases, and one would be much more interested to see exactly how much time such youngsters are spending inside an app like this.

Are they just ticking off all these elements, then wandering off to TikTok to scroll through clips? That would be a much more contextually relevant overview than these general notes.
To put this in perspective, Facebook claims 40 million young adults are coming to the app daily in the U.S. and Canada combined. Snapchat has 100 million daily active users in that same region, which again, would largely be of that same young adult demographic, and TikTok claims to have 170 million active users in the U.S.

So again, it does seem like it will be an uphill battle for Facebook to get the youngsters spending more time in the app yet, Facebook's parent company Meta also knows that it'll need youth interest to drive the adoption of its metaverse experience.

The truth is that the actual driving principle of the metaverse is in young user behavior, and kids are already spending much more of their social time in gaming worlds like Minecraft, Fortnite, or Roblox. Essentially, these are templates for the metaverse because they already imagine children connecting through avatars and digital characters-altering the paradigm through which we connect. It's that trend that Meta's using as an indicator of future interest in its VR experience, so it really needs to align its development with younger users in order to drive the next stage.

As such, its announced focus on younger users does make sense. But can Facebook actually get more young users to care about Facebook once again?

While this presents the bar for what it prevents access from seeing a substantial audience, the sheer scope of what this company says it has been focused on: three major things it must win them over to: 

Improving Reels and Feed ranking to drive better relevance
Updated video viewing experience, and ability to share clips privately
Improved monetization opportunities for creators
None of these may be a sure-fire winner, but on the high level of abstraction, Facebook says it's more interested in building tools that extend much beyond the social graph to which it's become accustomed and on which it's long relied for its stickiness; rather, the platform is looking for ways in which young people can connect to a much broader set of interests.

Really, it's kind of a strange thing to print. Like, why to announce anything on that front when there's nothing really to actually announce? And still, for some unknown reason, Facebook wants young people to know that it's cool to hang out on Facebook once again.

Because that is the way to be cool, by telling people that you are.

In either case, though, Facebook is keen on tapping into the youth market; thus, if you find yourself wondering why they include that or the other new feature, maybe consider the context.