‘KIDSTA’ ’GRAM IS PAUSED
Under-13 furor
Instagram is “pausing” plans for a version of the social-media platform aimed at kids under 13 after a backlash from child-safety advocates and lawmakers, the Facebookowned app said Monday.
The news comes as Instagram faces increased scrutiny after a damning Wall Street Journal report showed the developers’ own research has found the photo-sharing app makes body-image issues worse for many teen girls.
The decision also comes days before Antigone Davis, Facebook’s head of global safety, is due to testify to Congress on Thursday, where she is expected to be grilled about the company’s internal Instagram report and other issues.
In a blog post announcing the suspension of Instagram Kids, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said the company still believes “building ‘Instagram Kids’ is the right thing to do.”
“Critics of ‘Instagram Kids’ will see this as an acknowledgement that the project is a bad idea,” wrote Mosseri.
“That’s not the case. The reality is that kids are already online, and we believe that developing age-appropriate experiences designed specifically for them is far better for parents than where we are today.”
He pointed to under-13 versions of YouTube and TikTok as evidence that children’s versions of apps are accepted in the tech world.
On Sunday, Facebook had released an earlier defense of Instagram, insisting that the popular photo-sharing app makes teen girls feel better about themselves.
Pratiti Raychoudhury, Facebook’s vice president of research, wrote in response to the Wall Street Journal investigation that found, among other things, that Facebook’s internal research had shown the Instagram app makes “body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.”
Raychoudhury did not confront many of the Journal’s assertions, including that teens said they feel addicted to Instagram.
Instead, she argued that the Journal’s characterization of Facebook’s findings on how Instagram affects body-image issues in teen girls was without context and “simply not accurate” — even though the report quoted directly from a leaked internal document.
“The research actually demonstrated that many teens we heard from feel that using Instagram helps them when they are struggling with the kinds of hard moments and issues teenagers have always faced,” Raychoudhury said.