Stop to Instagram Kids, but Messenger, YouTube and TikTok have versions under 13
Facebook postpones Instagram Kids. As criticism grows about Instagram's negative effect on teens, the company has decided to pause the version of the app designed for under 13s. But what are Messenger, YouTube and TikTok doing?
No Instagram Kids… for now.
Yesterday Facebook announced that it will suspend the launch of Instagram Kids, a version of its popular photo-sharing app designed specifically for children under 13.
The Menlo Park group (owner of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp) made this decision in the wake of criticism of Instagram's negative effect on younger users.
In fact, last week the Wall Street Journal published a report that the company knew that some teenagers' use of Instagram led to mental health problems and anxiety.
In the post published on Sept. 27, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said he believes Instagram Kids is important because kids are already using the app. At the moment, the registration to Instagram is only allowed to children aged 13 and over.
"The reality is that children are already online and we believe that developing age-appropriate experiences designed specifically for them is much better for parents than where we are today," said Mosseri.
Instagram Kids would be an ad-free environment with more content controls for parents, the company said, similar to YouTube Kids, Spotify Kids, or Messenger Kids, also owned by Facebook.
But politicians and children's organizations disagree.
All the details.
STAND-BY FOR THE INSTAGRAM KIDS PROJECT
In his statement on Monday, Mosseri said he is alongside Instagram Kids and wants to continue developing the app in the future.
Mosseri said the company believes it's best for children under 13 to have a specific platform for age-appropriate content. Instagram Kids is in fact designed for users between the ages of 10 and 12, no longer young. Additionally, the app would have required parental permission to participate and would be ad-free by including age-appropriate content and features.
Pausing the project, however, will give his team time to talk to "parents, experts, policy makers and regulators" about their concerns.
ALL THE POLITICAL PRESSURES (AND NOT ONLY)
Last March Facebook announced the development of an Instagram Kids app, claiming at the time that it was "exploring a parent-controlled experience".
In April, the nonprofit campaign for an ad-free childhood sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg urging him to cease plans for Instagram Kids.
In May, nearly 50 attorneys general sent a letter to Zuckerberg asking him to abandon plans to create a platform for children under 13, citing mental health and privacy concerns.
US lawmakers on both sides have expressed concern about Instagram Kids. So much so that a group of Democrats wrote a letter to Zuckerberg asking for more information on how it intends to distribute the app to what they called a "particularly vulnerable online population".
WHAT HAS EMERGED FROM THE INTERNAL FACEBOOK RESEARCH PUBLISHED BY THE WSL
But the coup de grace for the Instagram Kids project came with the Wall Street Journal report .
On Sept. 14, the Journal reported that internal Facebook research showed that Instagram negatively impacts teenage girls' self-perception. "Thirty-two percent of teenage girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse," the company said in an internal presentation in March 2020.
THE REPLICA OF MOSSERI
In the statement published on Sept. 27, Mosseri also addressed the WSJ report, stating that he did not "agree with the way the Journal reported our research."
Therefore, he added that the company announced last week that it is exploring ideas for addressing Instagram's negative effects on mental health.
YOUTUBE AND TIKTOK HAVE VERSIONS FOR UNDER 13
Not only that, in defense of the Instagram Kids project – put on hiatus by the company – the head of Instagram stressed that "YouTube and TikTok also have versions of their apps for children under 13".
Yet even these versions of YouTube and TikTok for under 13s have encountered obstacles.
Just remember that in 2019, YouTube received a $ 170 million fine for violating children's privacy on the web.
The latest news comes from China instead. Children in China will be able to access the national version of TikTok, known as Douyin, for only 40 minutes a day. This was announced by the owner of the ByteDance app. ByteDance said on Saturday that users in China under the age of 14 would be able to access the Douyin app only in a "youth mode" that would filter out "inappropriate" content.
WITHOUT FORGETTING MESSENGER KIDS
Finally, this isn't the first time Facebook has received backlash for a product aimed at kids.
Since its launch in 2017, Messenger Kids has connected millions of children, the platform is controlled by a parent's Facebook account.
Child development experts urged the company to shut down its Messenger Kids app in 2018, saying it wasn't responding to a "need" as Facebook insisted.
But Facebook moved on with the app. In 2020, Facebook expanded Messenger Kids to more than 170 countries around the world. The company has introduced new features for both parents and children, Messenger's messaging product director Sateesh Kumar Srinivasan recently told TheIndu .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/stop-a-instagram-kids-ma-messenger-youtube-e-tiktok-hanno-versioni-under-13/ on Tue, 28 Sep 2021 09:51:34 +0000.