Have a great vacation! I’m Alexandra Sternlicht, technology reporter.
When you subscribe, wall street journal In print, you may have been surprised to open the A section yesterday and see a full-page ad for Instagram. In huge text it says: “More than 75% of parents agree that young people under 16 should not be able to download apps from app stores without their permission. Instagram wants to work with Congress to pass federal legislation to make that a reality. I believe.”
The campaign, which also featured television commercials, comes as Instagram’s parent company Meta faces multiple lawsuits accusing the social media giant of harming children with its technology. The first of these lawsuits is a class action lawsuit filed against Meta and his peers ByteDance (TikTok), Snap, and Alphabet (YouTube), and school districts across the U.S. are warning that these companies are They allege that they caused physical and mental harm to them. The second lawsuit was brought by attorneys general from dozens of states, accusing Meta of addicting children to its technology in pursuit of huge profits.
Meta didn’t respond. luckQuestions about the relationship between the campaign and the lawsuit have been answered by the time of publication. However, the company’s head of global safety advocated for federal mandates on app store downloads by children in a Nov. 15 blog post. “Each state in the United States has passed a patchwork of different laws, many of which require that teens (of various ages) get parental approval to use certain apps and access apps. “Everyone needs to verify their age if they do so,” she says. “Teens are bouncing between many websites and apps, and social media laws that hold different platforms to different standards in different states don’t ensure that teens are consistently protected. It means no.”
For further context, throughout the 233-page complaint, attorneys general say Mehta was aware of Instagram accounts owned by children under 13, but removed those accounts after investigating the underage users. It states that it did not disable or disable it. “Meta knows that age restrictions are ineffective and that more than half of its teenage users lie about their age,” the complaint says. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, was quoted as saying in an internal chat, “I would be happy if the version grew from an age-appropriate version to a complete version.” [version] Instagram. ”
As part of a new marketing campaign, Meta appears to be shifting the responsibility of controlling app downloads by minors to app store owners Apple and Google. The campaign was launched in conjunction with research firm Morning Consult, which was commissioned by Mehta to conduct a survey on how parents feel about their children’s app downloads. Companies are finding that the overwhelming majority of parents (79%) want to approve their child’s app downloads, and they want to do so “in one place (such as an app store)” rather than per app. discovered.
It’s worth noting that Apple and Google already have parental control features available for app downloads, just not in the way Meta is proposing. And these controls still require a per-app authorization system.
The age limit debate is a difficult one. The attorney general has suggested that Mehta require children to upload a photo of their student ID card to verify their age. And a few months ago, Australia and the UK rolled back digital age verification measures, saying they introduced a new set of problems, including privacy and data security issues.
It will be interesting to see how Apple and Google respond, perhaps under pressure from the unlikely duo of metas and parents.
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This article originally appeared on Fortune.com