Just like a lot of people do after having a bad gig at the summer camp, Facebook has decided to take a break from the plans for working with the children. The head of Instagram Adam Mosseri had made an announcement yesterday that the company will be pausing the development for “Instagram Kids”, which is a version of the popular social media platform for users who are under 13 years of age.
If you are someone who thinks that kids who can use iPhones are scary you need to wait till you hear how afraid people are actually of the tweens using social media.
- In the month of May, forty-four attorneys general had asked Mark Zuckerberg for abandoning the particular idea, they argued that children with 14 years of age were too young to be able to deal with the huge world of targeted internet trolls and ads. The Attorneys General had also cited studies that show that social media has impacted the health of children negatively.
An investigation by WSJ, made a few weeks ago had revealed that it was already known to Facebook that Instagram was not a safe platform for the users however Facebook decided not to do anything about the issue. The internal research of Facebook had shown how Instagram had been making the issues of body image worse for the teenage girls and had also called Instagram to be “toxic.”
The Head of Facebook’s Research Pratiti Raychaudhury had pushed back the accusation made by WSJ and had said that the platforms of Facebook were not toxic.
This is just a pause
Adam Mosseri had said in a blog post, “While we stand by the need to develop this experience”- it is going to be a platform which is specially made for the youngsters where the parents will be able to monitor the kids’ DMS. The company is just wanting some more time to convince the experts, the parents and the regulators that the idea is a good one. However, some lawmakers wanted this concept of Instagram for children to be scrapped completely.