Instagram announced on Monday that it has halted its plans to develop an “Instagram Kids” app for children under thirteen. The company, which is owned by Facebook, put the project on hold after a wave of angry backlash from the public.
Instagram currently has an age limit of 13 for its users. Despite this, employees at the company noticed that younger children had migrated to the platform.
The social media giant cited this as the impetus to develop something that would attract children who were curious about the image-sharing application, saying to BBC News that this was a “practical solution to the ongoing industry problem of kids lying about their age to access apps.”
But the idea was quickly met with a wave of backlash. A letter from the Campaign for a Commercial-free Childhood, signed by 99 groups and individuals, said that the social media application was unhealthy for children and demanded the project be discarded entirely.
But the project received its harshest blow in the form of leaked internal research from Facebook that was reported on by the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ interpreted the research as finding that Instagram was “toxic for teen girls.”
It was only after this report surfaced that the company announced their project was on hold. Despite this, Facebook head of research Pratiti Raychoudhury defended the project against the WSJ, saying the reports were “simply not accurate.”
“The research actually demonstrated that many teens we heard from feel that using Instagram helps them when they are struggling with the kinds of hard moments and issues teenagers have always faced,” Raychoudhury wrote.
“While we believe building ‘Instagram Kids’ is the right thing to do, Instagram, and its parent company Facebook, will re-evaluate the project at a later date. In the interim Instagram will continue to focus on teen safety and expanding parental supervision features for teens,” the company said in a statement.
The report showed that the company had polled a group of teenage girls about how Instagram made them feel about their own bodies. The results they received were:
- worse – 32%
- better – 22%
- “no impact” – 46%
Adam Mosseri responds to Instagram Kids backlash on Twitter
Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri took to his Twitter feed to defend the program from the backlash:
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