Instagram For Kids Under The Age Of 13 Is In Progress - Internal Communication Suggests
Instagram For Kids
According to a news article, Instagram is building a kid's version of the app for children under the age of 13. Currently, to create an account on the main Instagram site, a user must be over the age of 13 — this is due to US online advertising laws intended to protect children under the age of 13, known as the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
Targeting online products to children under the age of 13 poses privacy issues and legal concerns. The Federal Trade Commission fined Google $170 million in September 2019 for breaching the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by monitoring children's viewing histories to deliver advertisements to them on YouTube. Musical.ly, the forerunner of TikTok, was fined $5.7 million in February 2019 for breaching COPPA.
In 2017, Facebook released an ad-free version of its Messenger chat app for kids, targeted at children aged 6 to 12. Children's health advocates slammed it as detrimental to children and urged Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to stop using it. Then, in 2019, a bug in Messenger Kids enabled children to enter groups with strangers, resulting in thousands of children being placed in chat rooms with unauthorized users. Facebook secretly shut down the unauthorized chats, claiming that only a "tiny number" of users were affected.
Kids Friendly Instagram
According to a leaked internal Instagram communication, the company is working on a "version of Instagram that enables people under the age of 13 to use Instagram for the first time safely." There are no specifics on how Instagram intends to achieve this.
BuzzFeed News gained access to an internal post written by Vishal Shah, Instagram's vice president of product. This message was posted on an employee message board, and it states that developing a kid-friendly website is now a top priority. “I'm excited to share that, moving forward, Instagram has recognized youth work as a priority and has added it to our H1 priority list. Within the Neighborhood Product Group, we'll be establishing a new youth pillar to concentrate on two things: (a) accelerating our dignity and privacy work to have the best possible experience for youth, and (b) creating an Instagram app that enables users under the age of 13 to use Instagram for the first time comfortably.”
Work on making Instagram a kid-friendly platform has already started. The company detailed new resources like the Parent Guide, which is rich with details about settings within Instagram on privacy and content controls, in a recent blog titled "Continuing to Make Instagram Safer for the Youngest Members of Our Group." The organization is also working to improve its knowledge of people's true ages. Apps for teens include prompting them to be more vigilant about interactions in DMs, limiting DMs between teens and adults they don't follow, encouraging teens to keep their accounts private, and several others.
New Instagram For Kids
In any case, a new Instagram version specifically for kids is reportedly in the works, and it will be similar to services like YouTube Kids, which focuses on kid-friendly content. According to the leaked post, Instagram Head Adam Mosseri and Facebook VP Pavni Diwanji, the latter, who previously worked with Google on YouTube Kids, will oversee the work on Instagram for Kids.
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