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Nineteen-year-old Gigi Painter hopes Facebook’s planned “Instagram Kids” never come true.
Growing up in a small Ohio town, Painter said he and most of his friends created Instagram accounts years before they turned 13, lying about their age.
He remembers constantly pushing to post good photos that would get lots of “likes” or positive comments. And then there was the ever-present threat of bullying on the platform. Some people at his school would create anonymous Instagram accounts where other students uploaded their photos with mean or sexually explicit captions.
He is not alone. A possible alliance of Congressional Democrats and Republicans, along with a number of child development experts and online advocacy groups, is now pressing Facebook to eliminate Instagram Kids, a service recommended for tweens. Their reasoning can be summarized as follows: A company that cannot remove human trafficking, hate speech and live-streaming of suicides from its platform should not be trusted to make an app for children.
“This is serious,” said Painter, who was able to close all social media accounts on his phone. “People base all their opinions about themselves on the feedback they get from a picture.”
Instagram, a small but beloved photo-sharing app, is having its Facebook moment when Facebook bought it for $1 billion in 2012. This is nothing to be jealous of. Creepy newspaper reports based on the company’s own research revealed that Facebook knows the harm Instagram can do to teens — especially teenage girls — when it comes to mental health and body image issues.
In a quick public relations attack, Facebook tried to downplay the reports, including its own research. It didn’t work.
On Thursday, one senator from each side of the aisle held the first of several hearings on the subject. Antigone Davis, Facebook’s head of global security, defended Instagram’s efforts to protect young people who use its platform, stressing that Facebook “deeply cares about the safety and security of the people on our platform.”
While the Senate Commerce Subcommittee is examining how Facebook is handling information from its own researchers about Instagram’s potential threat to young users, the company is playing the issue publicly.
The episode threatens to rival the scale of Facebook’s 2018 Cambridge Analytica debacle. Disclosures at the time showed that the data mining firm had gathered information on 87 million Facebook users without their consent, eventually leading to congressional hearings in which Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg first testified.
But Cambridge Analytica was complex and difficult to follow. During these hearings, some lawmakers didn’t even have a basic understanding of how social media worked.
Thursday’s hearing showed they had done some homework. The fallout could put an end to the tech company’s plan for a children’s product – and even encourage legislators to regulate the company if they can agree on how.
“It’s very clear that Facebook has viewed the events of the past two weeks as purely a PR issue,” said Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, an online watchdog group for children. Formerly known as the Ad-Free Childhood Campaign, the group does not receive money from Facebook or other companies, unlike the nonprofits Facebook brings in for expert advice on its products.
President of the Communications and Media Council of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Dr. Nusheen Ameenuddin said that there is one good thing about children’s internet use. During a pandemic quarantine, it can be a great place for kids to talk to friends, virtually explore a museum, or even earn money as influencers.
But some pediatric patients have been harassed or spent too much time scrolling through an endless stream of photos on apps like Instagram.
That’s why he and other pediatricians want Facebook to do a better job of making sure young children don’t go to sites like Instagram. And they want legislators to pass regulations on how tech companies can advertise to children.
“I understand they are a business,” Ameenuddin said. “(But) we don’t have to exploit the most vulnerable members of society.”
Despite dozens of hearings in recent years when politicians have publicly attacked Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to make big money off Americans’ data and privacy, legislators have failed to meaningfully regulate tech companies.
But Brooke Erin Duffy, professor of communications at Cornell University, noted on Thursday that Facebook had a hard time defending itself against US senators prepared with research and tough questions. The trial was completely different from the Zuckerberg grid in 2018, when the Senate asked him basic questions like how Facebook makes money.
“A focus on protecting children can be much more of a catalyst for regulation than other concerns and criticisms,” Duffy said. “Senators used this great piece of technology in a way we’ve never seen before.”
Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor who is now one of the company’s biggest critics, said it’s important to remember how Instagram got its start. It was a photo sharing app born in 2010 when smartphone cameras were pretty bad by today’s standards, its creators added photo filters to make people look better.
“The culture was making it look better from the start than it did in real life,” McNamee said. “This created a culture of envy that was the original design of the product and they bent over it every step of the way. Consider the entire influencer movement that started on Instagram. All of this was designed for that model of jealousy.”
“We need to understand that, as we do with food, pharmaceuticals and chemicals, this industry cannot operate safely without regulations,” McNamee said. “We’re running out of time.”
Painter, now a college student, says he cares less about getting “likes” on Instagram. But she worries about her younger relatives, who seem anxious about posting perfect photos on the platform. When she looks at how Instagram is used when she goes to school, she hopes it will be different for them.
“Oh my god, I don’t want them to go through this kind of thing too much,” Painter said.
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