Happy holidays! It’s tech reporter Alexandra Sternlicht here.
If you subscribe to the Wall Street Journal in print, you may have been surprised to open the A section yesterday to a full-page ad by Instagram. In giant text it reads: “More than 75% of parents agree: Teens under 16 shouldn’t be able to download apps from app stores without permission. Instagram wants to work with Congress to pass federal legislation to get it done.”
This campaign, which also features TV commercials, comes as Instagram parent Meta litigates multiple lawsuits that allege the social media giant has harmed children with its technologies. The first of these suits is a class action suit brought against Meta and its peers ByteDance (TikTok), Snap, and Alphabet (YouTube), in which school districts across the country allege that the companies caused physical and emotional harm to children. The second suit has been filed by the attorneys general of dozens of states, alleging that Meta has addicted children to its technologies in pursuit of enormous profits.
Meta did not respond to Fortune’s questions about the campaign and its relation to the suits by the time of publication. The company’s global head of safety did, however, write a Nov. 15 blog post that advocates for federal mandates on children’s downloads from app stores. “US states are passing a patchwork of different laws, many of which require teens (of varying ages) to get their parent’s approval to use certain apps, and for everyone to verify their age to access them,” she says. “Teens move interchangeably between many websites and apps, and social media laws that hold different platforms to different standards in different states will mean teens are inconsistently protected.”
For more background, throughout the 233-page complaint, the attorneys general say that Meta was aware of Instagram accounts belonging to kids under 13 and did not delete or disable those accounts after surveying the underage users. “Meta knows that its age-gating is ineffective and that more than half of its teen users lied about their age,” says the complaint. It cites an internal chat from Instagram chief Adam Mosseri saying, “We’d like it if they aged up from an age appropriate version to the full [version] of Instagram.”
As part of the new marketing campaign, Meta appears to be pushing the responsibility of controlling underage app downloads onto the app store owners Apple and Google. This campaign was launched in conjunction with survey firm Morning Consult, which Meta hired to run a study on how parents feel about child app downloads. The companies found that parents overwhelmingly (79%) would like to approve children’s app downloads and that they’d like to do so “in one place (such as an app store)” rather than on an app-by-app basis.
It’s worth noting that Apple and Google already have parental control features available for app downloads, just not in the manner that Meta suggests. And those controls still require an app-by-app approval system.
The conversation around age-gating is a difficult one. The attorneys general suggest that Meta ask kids to upload photos of their student IDs for age verification. And a few months ago, Australia and the U.K. walked back digital age-verification measures, saying they introduced a new suite of problems, including privacy and data security issues.
We’ll be watching for how Apple and Google respond, perhaps with pressures from the unlikely duo of Meta and parents.
Programming note: Data Sheet will be back after the holidays, returning to your inbox Jan. 2, 2024.
Alexandra Sternlicht
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