Instagram / BuzzFeed News
Instagram executives are planning to build a version of the popular photo-sharing application that can be used by children under the age of 13, according to an internal company post obtained by BuzzFeed News.
“I’m excited to announce that from now on we’ve identified youth work as a priority for Instagram and added it to our H1 priority list,” wrote Vishal Shah, Instagram vice president of product, on a message board for employees on Thursday. “We will be building a new pillar of youth within the Community Product Group to focus on two things: (a) accelerating our integrity and privacy work to ensure the safest experience possible for teenagers and (b) building a version of Instagram that allow people under the age of 13 to use Instagram safely for the first time. “
Current Instagram policy prohibits children under 13 from using the service.
According to the post, the work would be overseen by Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, and led by Pavni Diwanji, a vice president who joined the parent company Facebook in December. Previously, Diwanji worked at Google, where he oversaw products for the search giant’s children, including YouTube Kids.
Current Instagram policy prohibits children under 13 from using the service.
The house ad comes two days after Instagram said it needs to do more to protect its younger users. After coverage and public criticism about the abuse, intimidation or predation faced by teenagers in the app, the company published a blog post on Tuesday with the title “Continuing to make Instagram safer for the younger members of our community ”.
This post does not mention Instagram’s intention to create a product for children under 13, but states: “We require everyone to be at least 13 years old to use Instagram and we ask new users to inform their age when they sign up for an account for a while. “
The announcement lays the foundation for how Facebook – whose product family is used by 3.3 billion people every month – plans to expand its user base. While several laws limit how companies can create products for children, Instagram clearly sees children under the age of 13 as a viable growth segment, mainly because of the app’s popularity among teenagers.
In a short interview, Mosseri told BuzzFeed News that the company knows that “more and more children” want to use apps like Instagram and that it was a challenge to verify their age, since most people do not receive identification documents until they are in your teenagers from middle to end.
“We have to do a lot here,” he said, “but part of the solution is to create a version of Instagram for young people or children where parents have transparency or control. It is one of the things we are exploring ”.
Mosseri added that he was still at the beginning of product development on Instagram and that the company still did not have a “detailed plan”.
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Priya Kumar, a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland who researches how social media affects families, said that a children’s version of Instagram is a way for Facebook to attract young people and normalize the idea that “that social connections exist for monetized ”.
“From a privacy standpoint, you are just legitimizing children’s interactions by being monetized in the same way as all adults using these platforms,” she said.
Kumar said that children who use YouTube Kids often migrate to the main YouTube platform, which is a blessing for the company and worrisome for parents.
“Many children, by choice or by accident, migrate to the broader YouTube platform,” she said. “Just because you have a platform for children, it doesn’t mean they are going to stay there.”
The development of an Instagram product for children follows the launch in 2017 of Messenger Kids, a Facebook product aimed at children aged 6 to 12 years. After the product’s launch, a group of more than 95 child health advocates sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, asking him to discontinue the product and citing research that “overuse of digital devices and social media is harmful to children and adolescents, which makes it very likely that this new application will harm the healthy development of children ”.
“Just because you have a platform for children, it doesn’t mean they are going to stay there.”
Facebook said it consulted a number of experts on the development of Messenger Kids. Wired later revealed that the company had a financial relationship with most of the people and organizations that advised on the product.
In 2019, Verge reported that a bug in Messenger Kids allowed children to join groups with strangers, despite Facebook’s claims that the product had strict privacy controls.
The error meant that “thousands of children were left in chats with unauthorized users, a violation of the central promise of Messenger Kids,” according to Verge.
Facebook said the bug affected only a “small number of group chats”.
Instagram users already face problems with bullying and harassment. A 2017 survey by Ditch the Label, a non-profit anti-bullying organization, found that 42% of people aged 12 to 20 years had experienced cyberbullying on Instagram, the highest percentage of any measured platform. Almost two years later, Instagram announced resources aimed at combating bullying.
“Teenagers have always been cruel to each other. But Instagram offers an exceptionally powerful set of tools to do this, ”reported Atlantic.
“What we aspire to do – and it will take years, I want to make it clear – is to lead the fight against online bullying,” said Mosseri at a Facebook event in 2019.
That year, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in the United Kingdom reported that it had found a “200% increase in cases recorded in the use of Instagram to target and abuse children”. The segmentation and enticement of young children by older men on Instagram was also the focus of a story published on Medium entitled “I am a 37 year old mother and spent seven days online as an 11 year old girl”.
The moves that Instagram announced earlier this week aim to curb such abuses. The company said it would limit messages between teenagers and adults they don’t follow and “make it harder” for adults to find and follow teenagers.
“This could include things like restricting these adults from seeing teen accounts in ‘Suggested Users’, preventing them from discovering teen content in Moments or Automatically exploring and hiding their comments on public teen posts,” says the company’s post.
While Instagram is trying to become safe for teenagers, it is unclear how its executives believe it can make its platform safe for children under the age of 13. Mosseri, head of Instagram, who has faced security problems at home, covers the faces of his young children with emojis by posting pictures of them on his public account.
“Interesting that you blur your kids ‘faces while millions of moms / dads post their kids’ faces on their platform,” wrote a follower in a photo posted by Mosseri on Halloween last year. “What do you know that they don’t know about how these images are used?
Mosseri told BuzzFeed News that, as a public figure, security concerns led him to hide his children’s faces in these images. However, he still maintains private Instagram accounts for each of his own children to share his education with his family and friends around the world.
“I think it’s important to be careful about sharing confidential information,” he said.