FIXES FOR INSTAGRAM AND FACEBOOK
Note: If you find my posts too long or too dense to read on occasion, please just read the bolded portions. They present the key points I’m making and the most important information I’m sharing.
The evidence that Facebook and Instagram are harmful, especially to teens and young people, goes back to 2006 and has been growing consistently more definitive over the last fifteen years. (See my previous post for more detail.) The pressure from the public, especially parents, and most recently from Congress to address this problem is mounting.
In response, in mid-March, Meta Platforms (the new parent corporation for Facebook and Instagram) made an announcement of some new and coming parental supervision tools for Instagram. Note that teens will have to consent to their parents’ use of supervision tools! Furthermore, teens will know what their parents are seeing about their account and activity. Rather than building in universal safety controls, Meta claims it wants to enable parents to control teens’ social media activity because parents know their teens best and teens have different maturity levels. This sounds to me like a classic blame the victim – and the victim’s parents – strategy.
Moreover, Meta knows that many parents aren’t tech savvy and/or won’t have the time and energy to effectively control teens’ social media activity. It also knows that teens tend to be far more tech savvy than their parents and will often be able to evade parental controls. It could easily institute universal strategies to eliminate or greatly reduce the potential for harm from its platforms. Finally, it knows that teens’ vulnerability changes over time and that having harm protections in place by default would be much more effective than relying on parents to recognize and quickly react to teens’ changing vulnerability.
Here’s what Meta announced about new parental supervision tools for Instagram: [1]
· A Family Center providing information to teach parents how to talk about social media with teens.
· An ability for teens to invite a parent to supervise their social media account.
· Parental ability to see how much time their teens are spending on Instagram, whom they are following, who is following them, and when they complain to Instagram about another user. However, a parent will have to have an Instagram account themselves to do so.
· Future plans for:
o Parental ability to limit when teens can use Instagram (e.g., not during school or after bedtime),
o Blocking of access to inappropriate content by parents and/or based on ratings by the International Age Rating Coalition, and
o Parental supervision tools for its Oculus Quest virtual reality program, where parents, experts, and the British government have raised concerns about exposure to violence and harassment.
Meta acknowledged in its statement that many parents are not on social media and are not tech savvy – meaning that these parental controls are often meaningless. Furthermore, many of these controls, including the future plans, seem like controls that should have been put in place years ago and before these products ever went on the market, i.e., they're too little too late.
A bipartisan bill has been introduced in Congress, the Kids’ Online Safety Act (KOSA), requiring Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms to provide parents with more control over their children’s online interactions. The bill reflects months of congressional investigations and a history of failures by the social media platforms to respond to their documented harmful effects on young users. [2] Congress last passed legislation to protect children when they’re online, including their privacy, 24 years ago. [3] Needless to say, much has change since then and the current business model of Facebook, Instagram, and the Internet as a whole is simply not healthy for kids and teens.
KOSA would require social media platforms to provide “easy-to-use” tools to limit screen time, protect personal data, and keep kids under 16 safe. It holds the online platforms accountable by establishing an obligation for them to put the interests of children first and to make safety the default. It requires them to prevent the promotion of bullying, sexually abusive behavior, eating disorders, self-harm, and other harmful content. The bill mandates an annual independent audit of risks to minors, steps taken to prevent harm, and compliance with KOSA. [4]
The bill would require the social media platforms to be transparent about how they operate. It would require giving parents the ability to disable addictive product features and modify content recommendation algorithms to limit or ban certain types of content. It would require the social media platforms to provide researchers and regulators with access to company data to monitor and investigate actual and potential harm to teens and children. This would allow parents and policymakers to assess whether the online platforms are actually taking effective steps to protect children.
The root of the problems with social media platforms is that there is greater profit in promoting unsafe behaviors, creating animosity, encouraging extremism, and fueling pseudo-science than there is in creating a safe place for civil discourse based on facts. Our system of capitalism and the deference to and alignment of our policymakers with large corporations has allowed this business model that commodifies and exploits human attention to explode unchecked. In the world of social media, you, your time and attention span, and your clicks are the products that are being sold – to advertisers. This means the social media business is a race to the bottom; an enterprise based on stimulating, titillating, and capturing our most base emotional and subconscious responses. Social media’s ability to do harm to individuals, our society, and our democracy is well-documented and endemic to the current business model. Without strong and effective public oversight and control, the social media platforms will continue to inflict substantial harms.
I urge you to contact President Biden, as well as your U.S. Representative and Senators, to let them know that you support the Kids’ Online Safety Act and additional actions to regulate social media platforms.
You can email President Biden at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments or you can call the White House comment line at 202-456-1111 or the switchboard at 202-456-1414.
You can find contact information for your U.S. Representative at http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/ and for your U.S. Senators at http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm.
[1] Peng, I., 3/17/22, “Meta adds parental tools to Instagram,” The Boston Globe from Bloomberg News
[2] Zakrzewski, C., 2/17/22, “Senators introduce children’s online safety bill after months of hearings,” The Boston Globe from the Washington Post
[3] Monahan, D., 3/22/22, “Diverse coalition of advocates urges Congress to pass legislation to protect kids and teens online,” Fairplay (https://fairplayforkids.org/march-22-2022-diverse-coalition-of-advocates-urges-congress-to-pass-legislation-to-protect-kids-and-teens-online/)
[4] Blumenthal, Senator R., retrieved 2/16/22 from the Internet, “Blumenthal & Blackburn introduce comprehensive Kids’ Online Safety legislation,” (https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/blumenthal-and-blackburn-introduce-comprehensive-kids-online-safety-legislation)