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Instagram slows down its plan to develop a version of its flagship platform for children under 13, business leader Adam Mosseri announcement Monday. The news comes in the wake of a damning report from the Wall Street Journal who explained how the Facebook-owned company was fully aware of the platform’s negative impact on some the adolescent psyche based on internal research but knowingly buried the report to minimize bad press.
“We believe in construction”Instagram for kids is the right thing to do, but we are suspending the work, ”Mosseri wrote. “This will give us time to work with parents, experts, policy makers and regulators, to listen to their concerns and to demonstrate the value and importance of this project for young teens online today.”
We don’t know how long this “break” will last., and if that will actually solve the regulatory problems. Earlier this month, a number of legislators, including Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts be p. Catherine Castor from Florida, co-signed a joint letter urge Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg abandons plans to deploy the planned Kids product. The letter relies on the Journal’s initial report, which revealed that the company had knowingly buried internal research on the platform’s effects on adolescent well-being. And these effects weren’t good.
“Thirty-two percent of teenage girls said that when they felt bad in their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” the researchers wrote in a slide, from a presentation dated in early 2020 that reported was posted on an internal Facebook bulletin board.
Another presentation, from 2019, Put it more bluntly: “Teens blame Instagram for increasing rates of anxiety and depression,” he read, in part.. “This reaction was spontaneous and consistent across all groups. “
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News of these internal documents has been met indignantly by the regulators behind the aforementioned letter, and a nice… ho-hum response from the company in charge. Over the weekend, Facebook posted a blog post who tried to refute some of the Journal’s findings that the platform is a net negative for teens who use it.
“It is simply not correct that this research shows that Instagram is’toxic’ for teenage girls, ”wrote Pratiti Raychoudhury, who heads Facebook’s research division. “Research has actually shown that many teens we have heard from believe that using Instagram helps them when they are dealing with the kind of difficult times and issues that teens have always faced. ”
Raychoudhury’s argument, which includes point-by-point rebuttals of passages from the WSJ report, boilings until the Journal misinterprets its findings and sort out the worst nuggets of this internal presentation while ignoring the larger picture. “The [internal] research shows that one in three teenage girls who told us she had body image issues said using Instagram made them feel worse – not one in three all teenage girls, ”Raychoudhury wrote.
The fact that Mosseri appears to be putting the planned expansion of the teen-centric business on hold, rather than halting the project altogether, seems to imply that the company still doesn’t see the problem moving forward. corn Is see a problem with all the bad press he has right now. Hopefully this little respite teaches the company to, uh, maybe be more open about its internal research, rather than leaving it to reporters to stumble upon its more heinous parts.
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