Facebook builds an Instagram for kids

Instagram / BuzzFeed News

Managers at Instagram are planning to build a version of the popular photo-sharing app that can be used by children under 13, according to an internal post from the company that BuzzFeed News received.

“I am excited to announce that from now on we have identified youth work as a priority for Instagram and added it to our H1 priority list,” Vishal Shah, Instagram’s vice chairman of the product, wrote on an employee message board on Thursday . ‘We will build a new youth pillar in the Community Product Group to focus on two things: (a) accelerating our integrity and privacy efforts to ensure the safest possible experience for teens and (b) building a version of Instagram allowing people under the age of 13 to use Instagram safely for the first time. ”

Current Instagram policies prohibit children under the age of 13 from using the service.

According to the report, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, will oversee the work and will be led by Pavni Diwanji, a vice president who joined the parent company Facebook in December. Previously, Diwanji worked at Google, where she oversaw the search giant’s child-oriented products, including YouTube Kids.

Current Instagram policies prohibit children under the age of 13 from using the service.

The internal announcement comes two days after Instagram said it needs to do more to protect its latest users. Following coverage and public criticism of the abuse, bullying or robbery teenagers face in the app, the company on Tuesday published a blog post titled “Continue to Make Instagram Safer for the Youngest Members of Our Community” . “

The report does not mention Instagram’s intention to build a product for children under 13, but says: ‘We require everyone to be at least 13 to use Instagram, and have asked new users to change their age. give when they hold for an account for some time. ”

The announcement lays the foundation for how Facebook – whose family of products is used by 3.3 billion people every month – plans to expand its user base. While different laws restrict how companies can build and target products for kids, Instagram clearly sees kids under 13 as a viable growth segment, especially due to the app’s popularity among teens.

In a brief interview, Mosseri told BuzzFeed News that the company knows that “more and more children” want to use apps like Instagram and that it was a challenge to verify their age, as most people do not get identification documents before entering their age is not. teens from middle to late.

‘We have to do a lot here,’ he said, ‘but part of the solution is to create a version of Instagram for young people or children where parents have transparency or control. This is one of the things we are investigating. ”

Mosseri added that it was early in Instagram’s development of the product and that the company does not yet have a “detailed plan”.

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Priya Kumar, a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland who is researching how social media affects families, said that a version of Instagram for children is a way to connect young people to Facebook and normalize the idea that ‘social earnings exist to make money.’

“From a privacy perspective, you are only legitimizing that interaction between children and money is earned in the same way as all the adults who use these platforms,” ​​she said.

According to Kumar, children who use YouTube Kids often migrate to the main YouTube platform, which is a boon to the company and important to parents.

“Many children migrate by choice or accidentally to the broader YouTube platform,” she said. “Just because you have a platform for children, does not mean that the children will stay there.”

The development of an Instagram product for children follows the launch of Messenger Kids in 2017, a Facebook product aimed at children between the ages of 6 and 12. Following the launch of the product, a group of more as 95 advocates for children’s health sent a letter to Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, asking him to discontinue the product, citing research that ‘excessive use of digital devices and social media is harmful to children and teens, probably makes this new app undermine the healthy development of children. ‘

“Just because you have a platform for children, does not mean that the children will stay there.”

Facebook said it has consulted a variety of experts in the development of Messenger Kids. Wired later revealed that the company had a financial relationship with most people and organizations that advised on the product

In 2019, the Verge reported that a bug in Messenger Kids allows kids to join groups of strangers, despite Facebook’s claims that the product has strict privacy controls.

The error meant that ‘thousands of children were left in chats with unauthorized users, a violation of the core promise of Messenger Kids,’ according to the Verge.

Facebook said the bug only affected a ‘small number of group chats’.

Instagram users already have problems with bullying and harassment. In a 2017 survey by Ditch the Label, a non-profit organization, it was found that 42% of people between the ages of 12 and 20 experienced cyberbullying on Instagram, the highest percentage of any platform measured. About two years later, Instagram announced features aimed at combating bullying.

‘Teenagers have always been cruel to each other. But Instagram offers a unique, powerful set of tools to do that, ”reports Atlantic.

“What we want to do – and it will take years, I want to be clear – is to lead the fight against online bullying,” Mosseri said during a Facebook event in 2019.

That year, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in the UK reported that they saw a “200% increase in recorded cases in the use of Instagram to target children and find abuse.” The targeting and care of young children by older men on Instagram was also the focus of a story published on Medium, titled ‘I am a 37-year-old mother and I spent seven days online as an 11-year-old girl’ spend. ‘

The moves that Instagram announced earlier this week are meant to curb such abuse. The company said it would limit messages between teens and adults not following them, and that it would make “adults” harder to find and follow teens.

“This could include things like restricting these adults from viewing teen accounts in ‘Suggested Users,’ preventing them from discovering teen content in Reels of Explore, and automatically hiding their comments about teens on public posts,” the company said in a statement. .

While Instagram is trying to make itself safe for teens, it is unclear how the managers believe it can make their platform safe for children under 13. The head of Instagram, Mosseri, who has previously experienced security issues at home, covers the faces of his young people. children with emoticons when they place images of it in his public account.

“It’s interesting that you made children’s faces blurry while millions of moms / dads put their children’s faces on your platform,” wrote one follower in a photo Mosseri posted on Halloween last year. ‘What do you know they’re not about using these images?

Mosseri told BuzzFeed News that because he was a public figure, the security issues led him to hide his children’s faces in the images. However, he still keeps private Instagram accounts for each of his own children to share their education with his family members and friends around the world.

“I think it’s important to share sensitive information to be careful,” he said.

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