Thanks to damning reports in The Wall Street Journal, Facebook is once again on Capitol Hill trying to defend itself against the indefensible.
In this case, knowing that the social-media giant’s photo-sharing app, Instagram, is harmful to its young users, particularly teenage girls, and doing nothing about it.
According to leaked Facebook internal research, the company is aware that Instagram, more than any other social-media app, makes “body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.” Facebook, however, says that the negative effects aren’t widespread and those aspects they do find harmful are not easy to address.
And worse, during the Senate’s Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation hearing on the matter, the company’s global head of safety, Antigone Davis, attempted to convince the senators that the company protects kids.
“We strongly disagree with how this reporting characterized our work,” Davis said. “This research is not a bombshell.”
Sorry, 13 percent of suicidal British teen girls and 6 percent of Americans desiring to kill themselves thanks to Instagram is pretty massive. The Journal report also included a study showing that 66 percent of teen girls and 40 percent of teen boys on Instagram “experience negative social comparison.” When teen girls felt bad about their bodies, 32 percent said Instagram made them feel worse.
When Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) asked if the company has changed its policies in light of the studies, Davis refused a clear answer.
Instead she insisted that “our products actually add value and enrich teens’ lives.”
Clearly false.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who chairs the Commerce Committee’s consumer-protection panel, hit it right on the head, saying, “Facebook routinely puts profits ahead of kids’ online safety. We now know it chooses the growth of its products over the well-being of our children. We now know that it is indefensibly delinquent in acting to protect them.”
That’s the bottom line, isn’t it? Facebook just doesn’t care about doing the right thing.