Instagram Kids App on Pause as Facebook Argues Over Its Harm to Teens

Instagram is hitting the brakes on its plans to develop a model of its flagship platform for teenagers below 13, firm head Adam Mosseri announced on Monday. The information comes within the wake of a damning report from the Wall Street Journal that detailed how the Facebook-owned firm was totally conscious of the platform’s destructive influence on some teen women’ psyches based mostly on inner analysis however knowingly buried the report to reduce dangerous press.

“We believe building ‘Instagram Kids’ is the right thing to do, but we’re pausing the work,” Mosseri wrote. “This will give us time to work with parents, experts, policymakers and regulators, to listen to their concerns, and to demonstrate the value and importance of this project for younger teens online today.”

It’s unclear simply how lengthy this “pause” will final, and whether or not it can really allay any regulatory woes. Earlier this month, quite a few lawmakers, together with Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Rep. Kathy Castor of Florida, co-signed a joint letter urging Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to desert plans to roll out the deliberate Kids product. The letter attracts on the Journal’s preliminary report, which revealed that the corporate had knowingly buried inner analysis into the platform’s results on teen well-being. And these results weren’t good.

“Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” the researchers wrote in a single slide, from a presentation dated to early 2020 that was posted to an inner Facebook message board.

Another presentation, from 2019, laid it out it extra bluntly: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” it learn, partially. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

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The information of those inner paperwork was met with outrage by the regulators behind the aforementioned letter, and a reasonably… ho-hum response by the corporate in cost. Over the weekend, Facebook put out a blog post that tried to refute a number of the Journal’s findings that the platform is a net-negative for teenagers that use it.

“It is simply not accurate that this research demonstrates Instagram is ‘toxic’ for teen girls,” wrote Pratiti Raychoudhury, who heads Facebook’s research division. “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’s argument, which includes point-by-point refutations of passages in the WSJ report, boils down to the Journal misconstruing its findings and cherry-picking the worst nuggets from this internal presentation while ignoring the larger picture. “The [internal] research shows one in three of those teenage girls who told us they were experiencing body image issues reported that using Instagram made them feel worse—not one in three of all teenage girls,” Raychoudhury wrote.

The fact that Mosseri seems to be putting the company’s planned teen-centric expansion on pause—rather than cutting off the entire project entirely—seems to imply that the company still doesn’t see the issue with forging ahead, but does see an issue with all the bad press it’s been getting at the moment. Hopefully, this little breather will teach the company to, er, maybe be more forthcoming about its internal research, rather than leaving it up to journalists to stumble onto its most abhorrent parts.