Facebook confronts Senators furious about Insta’s risks

Facebook Inc’s head of global safety faced tough questions from lawmakers who accused the company of prioritising profit and growth over the health of its youngest users.

Senators at a hearing Thursday seized on Facebook’s internal research about the mental-health effects of its platforms, arguing the social media giant can’t be trusted to act in the best interest of children and teens. Senator Richard Blumenthal said Facebook has “chosen growth over children’s mental health and well-being, greed over preventing the suffering of children.”

“Facebook has shown us once again that it’s incapable of holding itself accountable,” Blumenthal said.

Facebook’s Antigone Davis said the company uses its own studies and works with outside experts to develop tools to keep young users safe on its platforms, give parents more safety options and prevent people younger than 13 from lying about their age to create accounts.

“It’s why we conduct this research: to make our platforms better, to minimise the bad and maximise the good, and to proactively identify where we can improve,” Davis said in her prepared remarks. “Facebook is committed to building better products for young people, and to doing everything we can to protect their privacy, safety, and wellbeing on our platforms.”

The hearing follows reporting by the Wall Street Journal that Facebook understood the negative effects

Instagram has on young users, including anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts, and yet downplayed the research. Almost a third of young teen girls with body image issues told Facebook that scrolling through Instagram made those issues worse, according to documents reviewed by the newspaper.

The Journal also detailed how Facebook is aware that millions of celebrities get special treatment for questionable content, human traffickers actively use the platform, and an algorithm change fuelled increasingly divisive posts. The Journal series has reignited anger in Washington at the social media giant, although lawmakers are still far from passing proposed legislation aimed at the platform.