Why Instagram for Kids?

 

Depends on who you ask. 

 

If you ask Instagram, which is part of Facebook, which is run by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, you will hear things like the following.  Despite our posted lower age limit of 13 for the regular Instagram image-sharing service, we know a lot of kids younger than that are lying to get on it.  We would prefer to create a new service designed just for pre-teenagers so we can customize it with parental controls and so on, and bring Instagram to those younger users who currently have to lie to use it.

 

If you ask the attorneys general of forty U. S. states, they will cite sociological studies that link social-media use to depression, anxiety, and bullying in young people.  Following the news in March that Instagram was contemplating this new service, the National Association of Attorneys General got together and issued a letter  in May to Mark Zuckerberg asking him not to do this thing.  That's as far as the letter went—they didn't say what they'd do if he went ahead and did it anyway.  But the implication is clear that lawsuits might be in the offing if the proposed new service causes problems in its targeted age group.

 

Way back in the dark ages of social media, shortly after 9/11/2001, I wrote an article speculating on the ethical implications of electronic communication.  The immediate context was the fact that during the Twin Towers attack that day, the radio systems that first responders were relying on to coordinate their uniquely challenging rescue efforts largely broke down.  At the time, I concluded that, other things being equal, more communication among human beings was better than less.  But back then, Facebook wasn't even a gleam in Zuckerberg's eye, and hardly anybody imagined the huge economic and social forces that growth of social media would lead to.

 

Some questions are like diamond drills.  If you keep asking them they just keep going deeper and deeper and sometimes reveal unexpected things.  One of these questions is the innocent-sounding, "What's the point?"

 

If you ask Mark Zuckerberg that question about Instagram for those under 13, I think the bottom-line answer must be to make more money.  There is a thin veneer of public service that social media likes to coat their enterprises with.  And there is justification for this veneer:  billions of people (yes, billions) successfully use social media for largely innocent activities such as keeping in touch with relatives and friends.  Because the vast majority of users do not pay for the service, Facebook and Instagram have to manipulate things so that their advertisers reach their intended audiences.  The user is the product and the advertiser is the customer.

 

Right off the bat, that step has strayed into a swamp that philosopher Immanuel Kant warned us against.  I am told that he said in effect, "Don't treat people as means, but only as ends."  That is to say, using people solely as a means to something else is wrong. 

 

Of course, every business enterprise in the world could be accused of such a thing, and so providers of goods and services should not treat their customers only as a means to make money.  And if Instagram goes ahead with its plans for the under-13 crowd, I'm sure they will make efforts to protect their users against some of the worst abuses that social media can be used for:  stalking, sexual predation, bullying, and other criminal activity.  But if they don't make money at it, they will have failed, because they are not a charity—they are a publicly-owned profit-making organization, and the point of such organizations is to make money.

 

There is a reason that Instagram currently says its users must be 13 or over.  Historically, at least within the last century or so, children were regarded as especially worthy of protection and special safeguards.  Just to give you an antiquated example, I attended the Fort Worth Independent School District from 1960 to 1972.  At that time, both teachers and parents made strenuous efforts to keep commercial enterprises and advertising out of public schools.  The only exception to this that I can recall is that in grade school, the teachers offered to let us practice saving money, and gave us little envelopes with the name of the First National Bank of Fort Worth printed on them.  That's it:  no TV, no sponsored commercial films, no nothing. 

 

I am told that things are different now.  History may judge our time as a peculiarly child-hostile period.  The ideal of a child being raised to adulthood by his two biological parents—one male, one female—is receding into the past as other situations arise that are more convenient to the parents, maybe, but shortchange the kids.  And I need not mention abortion as the ultimate child-hostile policy, but I did anyway.  In an era of declining birthrates, more people than ever are asking "What's the point?" about the whole business of childbearing in the first place, and coming up with a negative answer.

 

For a time, advertising on children's TV shows was also controversial, but that battle has receded into the distant past as TV itself turns into a bewildering array of shape-melding forms that anybody can access, even the baby in the nursery.  Short of getting laws passed that prohibit Instagram for kids under 13, even the state attorneys general can't do much more than write letters saying that they won't be happy if Instagram goes ahead with its plans.

 

Rather than further erode the influence and authority of parents over their children by taking even more of the child's attention away from the live human beings who care for them and using them as a means of profit as well as providing a dubious service that so far they have done fine without, I hope that Zuckerberg listens to the attorneys general and declares the under-13 set sacrosanct from further intrusions by his firm.  But to do so would indicate that he is getting a different answer to the question of what the point is than he's gotten up to now.  And so far, he's given no sign of doing so.

 

Sources:  I referred to a report on the Instagram plans at https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-instagram-for-children-under-13 and the reaction of the attorneys general at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2021/may/11/instagram-for-kids-the-social-media-site-no-one-asked-for.  Their letter to Zuckerberg can be found at https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/naag_letter_to_facebook_-_final.pdf.  I heard about this issue on the Drew Mariani Show, a feature of the Relevant Radio network.

YouTube, COPPA, and Twelve-Year-Old Lawyers

YouTube, as anybody who is reading this online probably knows, is a video-streaming service owned by Google.  Because Google makes money from ads that go along with its services, it is in Google’s interest to make such services as easily accessible as possible to the most people.  Accessing YouTube requires only the ability to spell, or maybe even just to point on a smartphone screen to an icon.  Such skills are easily mastered by children as young as eight. 

In April of 2017, USA Today carried a story about an eight-year-old boy in Ohio who not only figured out how to watch YouTube, but learned how to drive a car by watching instructional videos.  He and his four-year-old sister waited until their parents were asleep one day.  Then they went out to the family car and drove to McDonald’s, where he used his piggy-bank money to buy a cheeseburger.  People who saw him on his way to the restaurant and called the cops when they figured out what was happening nevertheless said he obeyed all the traffic laws and didn’t hit a thing. 

COPPA stands for the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, a federal law that prohibits collecting online data from children under 13 without the consent of parents.  Last April, a coalition of childrens’ privacy protection groups filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that YouTube does indeed collect data from kids under 13—location, usage habits, and more.  And just last week, a pair of U. S. representatives, one Democrat and one Republican, wrote a letter to Google chair Sundar Pichai to ask him how his company uses data collected on those under 13.

The only substantive response from the company so far on these matters has been the following:  “Protecting kids and families has always been a top priority for us. Because YouTube is not for children, we've invested significantly in the creation of the YouTube Kids app to offer an alternative specifically designed for children. We appreciate all efforts to protect families and children online and look forward to working with members of Congress to answer their questions."

Of course, kids get into all sorts of things that aren’t intended for them, YouTube included.  The only barrier that keeps kids under 13 away from YouTube is item 12 in the YouTube Terms and Conditions, which reads in part, “In any case, you affirm that you are over the age of 13, as the Service is not intended for children under 13. If you are under 13 years of age, then please do not use the Service. There are lots of other great web sites for you. Talk to your parents about what sites are appropriate for you.”

A recent Roz Chast cartoon in The New Yorker portrayed an updated carnival freak-show sign, and one of the featured creatures was “The Man Who Actually Read the Terms and Conditions.”  If I had a twelve-year-old child who came to me and told me that she had dutifully read the YouTube terms and conditions, and said to me, “Paragraph 12 told me to talk to you about what sites are appropriate for me,” I’d tell her to go check out the Harvard Law School application page.  And then I’d probably never forgive myself for having raised a lawyer. 

Everyone, including the lawyers who wrote those terms and conditions, knows that the chances of a child actually reading Paragraph 12 and acting on it are indistinguishable from zero.  But technically and legally, YouTube has told precocious under-13 lawyers, and anyone else in that age category, that they shouldn’t be watching YouTube.  Presumably, the company’s default position on this issue is, “Well, we warned kids to stay away and not to lie to us about their age.  What else can we do?”

And that is the question.  Displaying content that is inappropriate for young children is bad enough, but collecting data on them is illegal—technically, according to COPPA.  But here again, we run into a legal fiction.  While there are all sorts of good laws on the books to prevent this sort of thing, laws are pointless unless they are enforced.  And as far as I know, the filing of the childrens’ privacy group complaint to the FTC has vanished into the federal bureaucracy, and Sundar Pichai has not yet replied to the letter from David Cicilline (D-Rhode Island) and Jeff Fortenberry (R-Nebraska). 

This whole situation begins to remind me disquietingly of a joke that was told about the way work got done in the old Soviet Union.  When a Western tourist asked a worker privately about conditions in a town in Siberia where the pay was low and the store shelves were almost empty, he replied, “Well, we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” 

YouTube pretends to keep children under 13 from watching it, and when that doesn’t work, the federal government and its representatives pretend to try to do something about it.  I normally don’t like sounding cynical, but sometimes the level of hypocrisy gets so high that you simply can’t ignore it.

I am not accusing either privacy groups or members of Congress of hypocrisy in this case.  Filing complaints and writing letters are sincere efforts to do something about the situation.  But so far, they appear to be just as ineffectual as YouTube’s Paragraph 12 in keeping kids from being exploited or having their innocence (remember innocence?) stripped from them. 

Every age has its public priorities—institutions and ways of doing things that are so accepted and even praised that they cannot be seriously challenged.  Slavery was one such priority until less than two hundred years ago, but that finally changed for the better.  Perhaps kids watching YouTube videos and having their data used by Google is not the worst thing that can happen to them.  But it’s one tip of the iceberg of this culture’s neglect and exploitation of children that will have long-term effects that we may not even understand for decades, let alone be able to do anything about. 

The first step toward righting a wrong is to recognize it as wrong.  A few people are questioning whether a giant corporation should get away with pretending it’s not doing something that it’s doing, at the expense of children.  And that is a good first step, but only the first step on a long journey.

Sources:  I referred to an article at https://www.multichannel.com/news/reps-press-google-on-kids-data-collection-issues entitled “Reps. Press Google on Kids Data Collection Issues” published on Sept. 17, 2018.  The quotation from a YouTube representative is from https://www.cnet.com/news/lawmakers-pressure-google-to-share-how-youtube-collects-uses-kids-data/ published on Sept. 18, 2018.  The story of the 8-year-old who taught himself to drive on YouTube is at

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/04/13/8-year-old-learns-drive-youtube-heads-mcdonalds/100408432/.  And in case you’re having trouble falling asleep, YouTube’s terms and conditions can be read in full at https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms. 

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