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Some social media platforms are bad enough for mental health of adults. Often, kids also get onto the bandwagon, creating a crisis of short attention spans, inferiority complex, online abuse and what not. Yet Facebook was planning a children’s version of Instagram. Facing criticism, it has put on hold the plan to offer children below 13 with a photo-sharing platform of their own. The Instagram head maintains it’s basically not a bad idea, hinting at the possibility that the project may revive later.
“We believe building ‘Instagram Kids’ is the right thing to do, but we're pausing the work,” Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said in a blog post – https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/pausing-instagram-kids. “We’ll use this time to work with parents, experts and policymakers to demonstrate the value and need for this product. We’ll continue to build opt-in parental supervision tools for teens.”
The announcement came after several internal reports were published by the Wall Street Journal, highlighting Facebook’s own in-depth research showing a significant teen mental-health issue that the firm played down in public.
Read:
‘Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls'
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-toxic-for-teen-girls-company-documents-show-11631620739
‘Facebook keeps researching its own harms — and burying the findings’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/16/facebook-files-internal-research-harms/
Facebook, according to these reports, knew that a large number of teenage girls had reported
Instagram was hurting their body image and mental health. The social media giant also knew that its content moderation systems had double standards, treating celebrities differently than average users. These damaging revelations were kept under the wraps, and company executives made claims in public that were contrary to their own findings.
And Instagram was going ahead with its under-13 version too, though it had planned a full range of parental control options in it. Parents, child welfare advocates and policymakers had opposed the project. In May, 44 state attorneys general wrote to Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg to drop the idea of ‘Instagram Kids’ – https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/09/27/facebook-instagram-kids/ , pointing out that the platform could make young children vulnerable to sexual abuse among other threats.
Parents and experts fear social media apps like Facebook and Instagram can be addictive, and add to children’s screen time which in itself could be harmful.