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Zuck’s Red Line, Disney Settles with ScarJo, Junk Bond Fantasies Good afternoon, and welcome back to the The Daily Courant, our subscribers-only email highlighting the latest and greatest reporting being published across Puck.
Today, we lead off with Alex Kantrowitz‘s chilling insights into why Mark Zuckerberg paused Facebook’s controversial overtures to underage users—and why, given the platform’s looming demographic crisis, it is all but guaranteed to try again.
Below the fold, Matt Belloni wonders what it will take for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to restart the Golden Globes. Plus, William D. Cohan takes a closer look at Bitcoin, an ominous portent for the Tesla bulls, and the fate of junk bonds.
Will a potential internal upheaval become the trigger that leads Zuckerberg to change his company’s culture? Are you living on Mars? Facebook’s existential crisis is that it needs to hook a new generation of kids. “They’re trying to do everything possible to understand why people are leaving,” said one former engineer. ALEX KANTROWITZ Ever since the Wall Street Journal began publishing the Facebook Files, its harrowing series on the machinations inside the world’s largest social media platform, people have seized on the company’s plans for, of all things, Instagram Kids. The notion, on its face, appears as almost a caricature of Facebook’s steroidal growth ambitions and collective paucity of emotional intelligence: a toxic, Juul-like attempt to impress its addictive algorithm on a new generation. In one leaked document, Facebook researchers discuss the devastating mental health impact that Instagram can have on young girls. In another, the company considered whether it could “leverage playdates” to onboard more tweens to an ancillary product, Messenger Kids.
But while the public outcry is appropriate, given Facebook’s rapacious efforts to preserve and expand its market share, it also underscores an underlying vulnerability at the very top of the company. For all the controversy surrounding its overtures, Facebook appears less worried about seducing teens than what happens if those teens give up on them.
Late last week, as I watched the current Menlo Park scandal unfold, I reached out to former Facebook engineer Michael Sayman, who was sitting in a high school math class, years ago, when the overture to work at Facebook arrived. Mark Zuckerberg had taken note of the 16-year-old’s prodigious coding skills and wanted to talk. Sayman, somewhat bewildered, didn’t get much time to contemplate Zuckerberg’s entreaty. “I got my iPad taken away from me by my teacher,” he recalled.
By 17, Sayman was a full-fledged Facebook staff engineer, and he quickly learned how important young users are to the company. “They realize, I think pretty clearly,” Sayman told me, “that one generation using their product does not mean that the next generation is going to…”
FOUR STORIES WE’RE TALKING ABOUT 
The H.F.P.A. has generally done exactly what has been asked of them. Can this silly group have its silly awards show back now? MATTHEW BELLONI 
As other reporters who were covering the same events discovered, the Milley drama unfolded quite differently than Bob Woodward described it. JULIA IOFFE 
Peyton and Eli Manning’s “Manningcast” is already changing Monday Night Football for the better. Now come the imitators. MATTHEW BELLONI 
The years of Wall Street irrationality—and borrowers getting away with financial murder—may be finally coming to an end. WILLIAM D. COHAN
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