The Consumer Protection Committee, made up of Republican and Democratic senators, asked Facebook security expert Antigone Davis in a video hearing about the effects of Instagram on the mental health of adolescents and whether they continue to insist on launching a child-friendly version of the app.
The Wall Street Journal article listed the results of its research commissioned by Facebook. The leaked documentation made it clear that the company was aware that the photo and video sharing platform posed a threat to the mental health of adolescents. Presentations made for internal use presented frightening statistics:
According to them, 13% of British young people and 6% of Americans with suicidal thoughts blamed the social media site for this condition. The teenage girls were hit hardest by Instagram.
Davis was showered with questions for about three hours, while senators from large tobacco companies – who had previously systematically concealed the harmful effects of their products.
Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, chairman of the committee, said an article in the Journal and What an unscrupulous campaign Facebook is doing to win over the masses of young people and then exploit them.
We now know that as long as Facebook hides from the public how harmful Instagram is to young people in the meantime, his own researchers have been sounding the alarm for years. We know that Facebook routinely puts profit ahead of children’s online safety and that it is defenselessly guilty of not doing everything to protect them.
One of the central themes of Thursday’s meeting is Instagram Kids was an application for children, the development of which was shut down by Facebook after the Wall Street Journal published its unveiling article. Asked by senators whether Facebook had permanently abandoned the project, Davis gave evasive answers and stated that deeper research is needed to decide which features of the app are appropriate for under-13s.
On Wednesday, as a defense, Facebook released partial research on the positive mental health effects of Instagram. According to them: 57% of teenage girls who had a bad mood in the recent period stated that Instragram relieved these feelings. Of those who complained about privacy, 51% said the same.
Subsequently, the WSJ released more research findings, including those that Facebook did not want to make public. to bring. These included comments in several places in which the tech company tried to disprove the findings of its own researchers. Texas Senator Ted Cruz accused Facebook of “carefully selecting” those research that he considered could be of benefit to the investigation.
( CNBC )
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