On Thursday, March 8, Instagram’s Vice President of Product, Vishal Shah, announced through an internal post (within the company) that Instagram will be looking into starting an Instagram for youth users.
COURTESY // NENAD STOJKOVIC
“We will be building a new youth pillar within the Community Product Group to focus on two things: (a) accelerating our integrity and privacy work to ensure the safest possible experience for teens and (b) building a version of Instagram that allows people under the age of 13 to safely use Instagram for the first time,” said Shah. This means Instagram may have a youth-focused platform soon.
Currently, Instagram does not allow anyone under the age of 13 to use its platform on paper, which has proved to be a challenge to enforce in practice. Mosseri told BuzzFeed News that Instagram knows that more kids want to use social media apps like Instagram, and verifying the age of every user was proving to be a challenge. He also said there were many things to do, and creating an Instagram for kids was one thing.
The development of Instagram’s new youth-focused project is not the first youth-focused project to come from Facebook. In 2017, Facebook launched Messenger Kids, which targeted children between the ages of six and 12. In 2019, however, the Verge reported that Messenger Kids had a bug that allowed its youth users to join chats with unauthorized users, which violated the core idea behind Messenger Kids. Unauthorized users can be anyone, which means kids may find themselves talking with a grown person who could be a child predator.
The primary federal laws revolving around youth-focused media are the Communications Decency Act, which prohibits individuals from sending obscene or indecent messages to a recipient under 18, and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act made to help parents control media information their kids see. It is concerning that these are some of the only youth-focused media laws that Instagram will have to be compliant with when developing the youth platform. They are simply not strict or detailed enough to allow for a safe youth social media experience.
While this platform’s addition seems progressive, it cannot be as light-hearted as Instagram is portraying it. Adult Instagram is already associated with anxiety, depression, FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), and bullying. According to researchers from The Journal of Consumer Affairs, Instagram can foster poor sleep habits and a negative body image. If all of these adverse side effects are included in the kids’ version of Instagram, along with the stranger dangers that seeped through cracks on Messenger Kids, it doesn’t sound like a good bet.
When Facebook created Instagram, its users were the guinea pigs taking the first dose. No one could have ever predicted how social media would affect the human brain or social experience, and now we are all learning that it may not be so good for our mental stability. It feels like that is happening again, except for children, making things more complex and sensitive because our youth is our future.
Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook in 2004 and purchased Instagram in 2012. Take a step back and think about that for a second. How much has happened since 2004? 2012? How much has social media affected the lives of everyone on this earth? Considering the answers to these questions, it makes sense to hold back on creating a kid’s platform before strengthening the current infrastructure.
