Facebook has suspended development of the Instagram app for children under 13. The suspension was announced after the development of Instagram Kids was constantly criticized by US regulators.
Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri still defends the company's decision to develop Instagram Kids. He said Instagram would use this time to address the concerns of parents, experts, policymakers and regulators.
Mosseri emphasized that Instagram Kids is aimed at children aged 10-12 years. The app will not show ads and its use should be supervised by parents.
"Critics of 'Instagram Kids' will see this as an admission that the project is a bad idea. It's not like that," Mosseri said in an Instagram blog post, as quoted by The Guardian, Tuesday (28/9/2021).
"The reality is that kids are already online, and we believe that developing age-appropriate and tailored experiences for them is much better for parents than it is today."
Mosseri also gave an example of how two major social media platforms, YouTube and TikTok, also have special apps for children under the age of 13.
The suspension of the development of Instagram Kids was also announced following a Wall Street Journal report on the negative impact of Instagram on teenage girls. The WSJ cites internal Facebook studies in the last three years that examined how Instagram affects its teenage users.
An internal Facebook presentation found that among teens who expressed suicidal ideation, 13% of users from the UK and 6% from the US said the problem stemmed from Instagram. In addition, Instagram is also said to exacerbate the problem of 'body image' among teenage girls.
Facebook's head of research, Pratiti Raychoudhury, denied the report and called allegations that Instagram is harmful to teenage girls, inaccurate.
In a separate blog post, Raychoudhury gave an example from 12 presentation slides cited by WSJ, teenage girls only mention body image as a problem exacerbated by Instagram.
"This research, some relying solely on input from 40 teens, was designed to inform internal conversations about teens' most negative perceptions of Instagram. It did not measure causal relationships between Instagram and real-world problems," Raychoudhury said.