Dozens of attorneys general across the country want Facebook to scrub plans for an Instagram aimed at children under 13.
A letter to Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg from more than three dozen attorneys general on Monday made one thing perfectly clear: They believe that an Instagram for children is such a bad idea, Facebook should pull out of its plans to build one.
“Use of social media can be detrimental to the health and well-being of children, who are not equipped to navigate the challenges of having a social media account,” they wrote. “Facebook has historically failed to protect the welfare of children on its platforms. The attorneys general have an interest in protecting our youngest citizens, and Facebook’s plans to create a platform where kids under the age of 13 are encouraged to share content online is contrary to that interest.
Facebook has been pledging for weeks that it won’t target kids with ads. The promise stands out, because advertising is the lifeblood for the parent company. But it begs the question of why it wants to build an offering that will surely become a magnet of attention and scrutiny, if it can’t generate revenue from it.
There are numerous other reasons why the company would be interested in young people, of course. Marketers know well the power of attaching brands to childhood memories, as it can create an intimate bond that lasts for a lifetime. Meanwhile, the act of indoctrinating ever-younger users also has a short-term effect, further plumping up Instagram’s already massive user levels of more than a billion people.
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