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After the Wall Street Journal reported that it realized that Instagram harmed the mental health of teenagers, senators attacked the social media giants.
After a leaked internal investigation revealed that Facebook was aware of how its Instagram application harms the mental health of teenagers, US lawmakers criticized the company’s plan to protect children who use its social media platform.
Before the Senate Consumer Protection Subcommittee’s hearing on Thursday, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) newspaper published an article about how Facebook knew that its photo-sharing platform caused some teenagers, especially girls, to feel sad about their self-image.
Among the growing number of issues, Facebook earlier this week Suspended plan Developed Instagram Kids and expressed the hope that “to have time to work with parents, experts, policy makers and regulators to listen to their concerns”.
At the hearing on Thursday, Facebook’s head of global security, Antigo Davis, disputed the way the Wall Street Journal described the results of the study. She also said that the company is working hard to publish more internal research to make its findings more transparent.
Facebook’s Antigone Davis appeared on the screen during testimony to the Senate Subcommittee on Thursday [Tom Brenner/Pool via Reuters]“We are very concerned about the safety and security of people on our platform,” Davis said. “We take this issue very seriously… We have taken multiple protective measures to create a safe and age-appropriate experience for people 13 to 17 years old.”
But Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal did not believe it, describing the findings of the internal report as a “blockbuster.”
“This is strong, compelling, and fascinating evidence that Facebook is aware of the harmful effects of its website on children, and that it concealed these facts and findings,” he said at the hearing.
Democratic Senator Edward Maki added: “IG stands for Instagram, but it also stands for Insta-greed.”
‘Very damn’
Comparisons with the tobacco industry’s cover-up of the harmful effects of cigarettes abound at a conference that brought together U.S. senators from major political parties to criticize Facebook and Instagram, a platform owned by Facebook since 2012 and worth $100 billion.
Al Jazeera reporter Patty Culhane from Washington, D.C. said that congressional hearings “may lead to new regulations not only for Instagram and Facebook, but for all social media, on how to market to children”.
On Monday, the head of Instagram Adam Mosseri also disputed the Wall Street Journal’s findings.
“Recently, the Wall Street Journal’s report on our research on teenagers’ experiences on Instagram raised a lot of questions. To be clear, I disagree with how the Wall Street Journal reports on our research,” he said in a statement Say.
But Danny Weiss, chief propaganda officer of Common Sense Media, a non-profit organization that focuses on improving the impact of technology on children, said that the internal investigation report is indeed a “blockbuster.”
Weiss told Al Jazeera: “The Wall Street Journal’s findings through whistleblowers have a very bad attitude towards Facebook and how it works, and Facebook’s attitude towards children and teenagers-a special group of people who need additional special protection.”.
He said that parents need to receive a better education to understand their children’s behavior on social media, and technology companies need to do better to minimize the spread of toxic content on the platform. Finally, Weiss said, “The government obviously needs to step in and hold technology companies accountable.”
The second hearing is scheduled to be held on Tuesday, when Facebook whistleblowers will participate.
The whistleblowers are expected to reveal their identities in a 60-minute taped interview on the U.S. News program on Sunday. In the trailer, the show described the woman as a former Facebook employee who left with tens of thousands of pages of research.
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