Instagram director Adam Mosseri announced today that Facebook is suspending his project Instagram for kids and create new parental supervision tools.
In recent months, we found that Facebook was developing an alternative to Instagram for kids. The news was not well received and the company received a lot of criticism about it.
What else, Wall Street Journal posted some internal Facebook documents saying how Instragram is harmful to children.
32% of teens said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse. […] Instagram comparisons can change the way young women see and describe themselves.
Now Instagram boss Adam Mosseri has posted an article where it says that The company stopped Instagram for Kids and explains what the project’s intentions were:
We started this project to solve a major problem seen in our industry: kids are getting younger and younger phones, they’re lying about their age, and they’re downloading apps aimed at people aged 13 and over.
We firmly believe that it’s better for parents to have the option of giving their kids access to a version of Instagram designed for them – where parents can monitor and control their experience – than relying on an app’s ability to verify the age of kids , children too young to have an identification document.
Although we still need to develop this experience, we decided to pause this project. This will give us time to work with parents, experts, policymakers and regulators, listen to their concerns and demonstrate the value and importance of this project for today’s online teenagers.
In the blog post, Mosseri says Instagram isn’t the only company that cares about preteens. YouTube and TikTok have versions of their apps for children under 13 years old. Says Instagram for kids wouldn’t be the same as the app is today.
The new app was never aimed at children, but at pre-teens (aged 10-12). It would require parental permission to participate, have no advertisements, and have age-appropriate content and resources.
Parents can monitor how much time their children spend in the app and control who can message them, who can follow them, and who they can follow.
Although the project is on hiatus, Mosseri says Instagram will continue to work to allow parents to monitor their children’s accounts, extending those tools to teenagers’ accounts on the platform.