Facebook to build Instagram for children under 13
Instagram head Adam Mosseri confirms that he is working on a version of the popular photo-sharing app for kids under 13, BuzzFeed News reports. According to BuzzFeed News, the Facebook-owned company knows that many kids want to use Instagram, Mosseri said, but there is no "blueprint" yet.
"But part of the solution is to create a version of Instagram for young people or children where parents have transparency or control," Mosseri told BuzzFeed News. "It is one of the things that we are exploring." The current Instagram policy prohibits children under the age of 13 from accessing the platform.
"Increasingly, kids are asking their parents if they can join apps that help them keep up with their friends," Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesperson, said in an email to The Verge. "Right now, there aren't many options for parents, so we're working on building additional products — like we did with Messenger Kids — that are suitable for kids, managed by parents. We're exploring bringing a parent-controlled experience to Instagram to help kids keep up with their friends, discover new hobbies and interests, and more."
BuzzFeed News got a message from an internal message board where Instagram VP of Product Vishal Shah said the company had identified a "pillar of youth" project as a priority. His community products group will focus on privacy and security issues "to ensure the safest possible experience for teens," Shah wrote in the post. Mosseri would oversee the project alongside Vice President Pavni Diwanji, who oversaw YouTube Kids while at Google.
Instagram published a blog post earlier this week describing its work to make the platform safe for its younger users but did not mention a new version for children under 13.
Targeting products online for children under the age of 13 is fraught with privacy concerns and legal issues. In September 2019, the Federal Trade Commission fined Google $ 170 million for tracking children's viewing history to show them ads on YouTube, a violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The TikTok Musical.ly forerunner was fined $ 5.7 million for violating COPPA in February 2019.
Facebook launched an ad-free version of its Messenger chat platform for children in 2017, aimed at children between the ages of 6 and 12. Child health advocates criticized it for being harmful to children and urged CEO Mark Zuckerberg to suspend it. In 2019, a bug in Messenger Kids allowed children to join groups with strangers, leaving thousands of children in chats with unauthorized users. Facebook quietly shut down those unauthorized chats, which it said affected "a small number" of users.