‘BODY’ SLAMMED
Senators rip Facebook over teen report
Senators hammered Facebook in a contentious hearing with its safety chief on Thursday, blasting the company over leaked research showing that Instagram can make body issues worse for many teen girls.
“While Facebook publicly denies that Facebook is harmful for teens, privately Facebook experts and researchers have been ringing the alarm for years,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).
The Senate’s Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation called the hearing after a series of damning reports in the Wall Street Journal showed that Facebook’s own research found that Instagram makes “body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.” Blumenthal said his office had received thousands of pages of documents that built on the Journal’s reporting from a whistleblower who is set to testify next week.
Facebook’s global head of safety, Antigone Davis, scrambled to play down the Journal reports and convince senators that the company protects kids. “We strongly disagree with how this reporting characterized our work,” Davis said. “This research is not a bombshell.”
The Journal’s reporting showed that an internal Instagram study found 13 percent of British teens and 6 percent of American teens with a desire to kill themselves traced that desire to Instagram.
Under questioning about that statistic by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Davis said she “disagrees with the characterization of the research” in the Journal report, saying the research did not establish a “causal” relationship and that the real figure was closer to 0.5 percent.
Cruz also asked if Facebook had changed its policies based on the suicide study, but Davis would not provide a definitive answer. She also refused to confirm the Journal’s reporting that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was aware of the research.
Hours before Davis’ more than twohour-long testimony, Facebook published what it said were two research slide decks that the newspaper used in its reporting. The company added annotations to each slide that sometimes play down and dispute its own research.
Shortly afterward, the Journal published a more comprehensive series of slides, including a slideshow called “Teen Girls Body Image and Social Comparison on Instagram.”
That report included a study showing that 66 percent of teen girls and 40 percent of teen boys who use Instagram “experience negative social comparison.” When teen girls felt bad about their bodies, 32 percent said Instagram made them feel worse, according to the slides.
Davis said that Facebook was trying to release more of its Instagram studies but did not provide a concrete commitment or timeline.
She spoke to the senators — who darted in and out of the hearing in order to vote on a government-funding bill — through a video call in front of a granite backdrop with flowers and books.
When Cruz asked Davis where she was calling from, Davis said she was in a conference room in Washington, DC.
“Facebook is in the process of hiding,” Cruz countered. “You’re not physically here even though you’re blocks away from us.”