Steve Jobs famously said Apple makes products that consumers don't know they want. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a slightly different challenge: He's creating products that people are explicitly telling Facebook they absolutely do not want.

Instagram for Kids, a version of the photo-sharing app for children under 13, is causing an outcry before it's even been released. On Monday, 40 state attorneys general in the US wrote Zuckerberg asking him to abandon plans for the app, saying pre-teens are "not equipped to navigate the challenges of having a social media account."

Facebook's cryptocurrency Diem (née Libra) ran into a similar wall of opposition when it was announced in 2019. This week the Facebook-backed project said it would shift its focus to creating a US dollar stablecoin, withdrawing more ambitious plans to get a license from Swiss financial regulators.

And changes to WhatsApp's terms of service, designed to help Facebook turn the messaging app into an ecommerce platform, have been stymied by backlash for months — hordes of users defected to rival messaging platforms like Signal and Telegram when the news was initially announced, and now everyone from Germany's privacy regulator to the US Congressional Hispanic Caucus is trying to stop it.

For an organization founded on the "move fast" credo, all this product pushback is more than a little inconvenient. But this would be a problem for any company. It's tough to grow a business when news of your next product drop doesn't cause excitement but rather, alarm and opposition.

News source: https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerbergs-existential-product-crisis-2021-5