Facebook shelves 'Instagram Kids' plan

News 28 Sep 2021 - 2 min read

Facebook shelves 'Instagram Kids' plan

By Sam Buckingham-Jones - Senior Writer

“Our peers recognized these issues and built experiences for kids. YouTube and TikTok have versions of their app for those under 13," Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, said.

Market Voice 3 min read

Retail media: Key lessons to avoid repeating programmatic ‘gold rush’ mistakes, hollowing out brand budgets

By Rory Heffernan - Chief Executive Officer, Atomic 212º | Partner Content

Retail media’s rise comes as marketers are being told to do even more with even less, says Atomic 212º Chief Executive Officer, Rory Heffernan, and puts brand budgets under further pressure.

Market Voice 4 min read

Airports are back bigger and better: why they are the next frontier for incredibly human brand connection

By Jemma Enright - General Manager, Airport, JCDecaux ANZ | Partner Content

In the next 5 years, brands will be reaching 85m passengers a year in the transformed terminals of Sydney, Adelaide, and Perth airports. That’s a massive opportunity to engage an emotionally charged audience in a context of curiosity and discovery, says JCDecaux’s Jemma Enright.

Market Voice 3 min read

The best relationships are personal – regional strategies should be too

By Phil Leyshon - Director of Digital, ACM | Partner Content

Mi3 sat down with ACM Director of Digital Phil Leyshon to discuss how first party data and enriched targeting is bringing brands closer to the regions – and notching upwards of 30 per cent growth.

Tags: Instagram brand safety children Adam Mosseri

“Instagram Kids” has been stopped in its tracks after a series of investigative stories from the Wall Street Journal raised questions about how Instagram and Facebook have approached safety measures on their platforms. Pausing is "the right thing to do" but the platform insists it needs to do more around how children under 13 interact with its features.

What you need to know:

Facebook is pausing development of an “Instagram Kids”.
The company has been under fire in recent weeks after the Wall Street Journal reported it had prioritised engagement over safety in the face of internal research showing the damaging impact its platform were having.

Instagram has shelved plans to develop of a version of its platform for kids, citing the need for more time to work with parents, experts, and legislators after a barrage of articles from the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

News that Facebook was building “Instagram Kids” was reported in March this year, after a post by a senior Instagram executive on an internal message board was leaked. Working on a version of Instagram that allows kids under 13 years old to safely use the platform was described as a “H1 priority” at the time.

In a blog post and series of tweets overnight, however, Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, wrote that while he believed an ad-free platform that addressed the problem of kids lying about their age was necessary, Facebook needs more time to demonstrate the project’s value.

“Critics of 'Instagram Kids' will see this as an acknowledgment that the project is a bad idea. That’s not the case. The reality is that kids are already online, and we believe that developing age-appropriate experiences designed specifically for them is far better for parents than where we are today,” Mosseri wrote.

“Our peers recognised these issues and built experiences for kids. YouTube and TikTok have versions of their app for those under 13.”

The re-designed app wasn’t meant for children, but rather “tweens” – those aged between 10 and 12. It would require parental permission to join, wouldn’t show advertising, and would have age-appropriate content and features.

Likewise, he said news of the platform leaked "before we knew what it would be. People feared the worst, and we had very few answers at that stage."

Mosseri said while Instagram is pausing building an alternate platform, it will continue to expand tools allowing parents to oversee their children’s accounts.

The decision comes in the wake of The Facebook Files, a series of stories from the WSJ that alleged Facebook knew its platforms were “riddled with flaws that cause harm”, understood through its own internal research the damage they had been causing, but chose on multiple occasions to prioritise engagement metrics over safety.

The reporting included information about an internal “whitelist” rule that exempted high-profile users from community standards and enforcement, internal research that demonstrated the negative impact of Instagram on teenage girls, and the impact of 2018 algorithm changes that made the platform angrier rather than healthier.

Mosseri wrote the recent stories had “raised a lot of questions for people”.

“To be clear, I don’t agree with how the Journal has reported on our research… we do research like this so we can make Instagram better. That means our insights often shed light on problems, but they inspire new ideas and changes to Instagram.”