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The Tech Oversight Project: No Announcement Could Ever Fix Meta’s Youth Safety Failures


Sep 17, 2024

As Instagram tries to spin away bad headlines with yet another hollow policy announcement, The Tech Oversight Project Director Sacha Haworth called out Instagram’s owner, Meta, for breaking promise after promise to protect kids and teens, while urging the House to act swiftly on the Kids Online Safety Act:

“With the bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act gaining momentum, no amount of spin from Instagram and Meta can deflect attention from the prospect of real change. Meta can push out as many ‘kid-’ or ‘teen’-focused ‘features’ as it wants, it won’t change the fact that its core business model is predicated on profiting off and encouraging children and teenagers to become addicted to its products – and American parents are wise to the hustle and demanding legislative action. With Instagram’s and Meta’s trail of broken promises and policy reversals, youth online safety advocates should ignore Meta’s latest hollow announcement and keep focusing energy and attention on finishing the job on the Kids Online Safety Act, widely-supported bipartisan legislation that would provide sustainable protections for kids’ safety and well-being and real options for parents to meaningfully engage.”

Instagram’s Repeated Failures to Self-Regulate, Protect Kids

Meta’s history of hollow policy announcements

  • Without meaningful federal legislation to provide oversight and accountability, Big Tech companies have chosen to offer only sporadic and incomplete disclosures that keep policymakers and the American public in the dark. 
  • Researchers have documented more than 100 broken promises from Big Tech that were “announced publicly, only to be later retracted, significantly altered, marginalized, or never come to fruition” – including almost 50 broken promises made by Meta.
  • Instagram has repeatedly evaded transparency and hidden information about the prevalence of harmful contact and algorithmically-recommended content on its platform despite having that information readily available, so parents and lawmakers have no trustworthy way to evaluate its platform safety or the impact of this policy announcement.
  • Whistleblower Arturo Bejar’s Congressional testimony last November revealed that Mark Zuckerberg and Meta’s executive team personally engaged in a cover-up after being presented with evidence of egregious and obvious harm to minors.

Meta’s history of endangering & harming youth

  • Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg knew that Facebook and Instagram were designed to be addictive and detrimental to young people’s mental health, particularly teen girls, but lied to Congress about it under oath.
  • Instagram’s plans to roll out an Instagram for Kids platform were shelved in 2021 due to outcry from parents and social media watchdog groups.
  • Despite leaked internal documents laying out the problem that “thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” and adding that “teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” Meta’s senior leadership did nothing to alter their platform or algorithm.
  • In June 2024, the Wall Street Journal exposed Instagram and parent-company Meta for helping connect a vast network of sexual predators on Instagram that were openly devoted to the commissioning and sale of child sexual abuse material.
  • “In a July 2020 document titled ‘Child Safety — State of Play (7/20),’ Meta listed ‘immediate product vulnerabilities” that could harm children, including the difficulty reporting disappearing videos and confirmed that safeguards available on Facebook were not always present on Instagram.’ (AP, 1/17/24)

 

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