Anyone who has been in Washington, DC in recent weeks has likely seen Instagram’s ads. The social media app’s parent company, Meta, has been running an expensive ad campaign, including print, TV, and newsletter ads, announcing that “Instagram wants to work with Congress to pass federal legislation” that would require teens to have parental permission to download apps to their phones. This may sound responsible and nice, but the campaign is a classic case of virtue signaling by a social media company trying to divert attention from its own poor track record of protecting kids.
The timing of Meta’s ad blitz couldn’t be more transparently self-serving. On January 31, the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing with the CEOs of five social media companies, including Meta, X, TikTok, Snap and Discord, to discuss their “failure to protect children online.” While all of these companies deserve a grilling, among this group, Meta arguably has the worst track record on protecting children.
Ever since Meta whistleblower Frances Haugen testified in 2021, we have known that Meta understands the harm its products are doing to children, yet failing to act. The Wall Street Journal unveiled the extent of the problem with Instagram in particular in a deeply-researched piece last summer, where it found that the app’s algorithms connected and promoted a vast network of accounts focused on committing and purchasing underage sex content.
This fall, a lawsuit brought against Meta by 33 state attorneys general further alleged that the company was aware accounts belonged to children under 13, but in order to protect its profits, did nothing to disable or delete those accounts. The suit quoted Instagram head Adam Mosseri as writing that “We’d like it if they aged up from an appropriate version to the full version of Instagram.”
In the latest example, just last week, the Wall Street Journal reported on newly-disclosed internal Meta documents showing that the company knew that 100,000 minors were receiving sexually-explicit photos on Instagram and Facebook every single day, but did almost nothing in response.
Despite these and numerous other examples of Meta looking the other way as its products harm kids, the company now wants us all to believe that it actually gives a hoot about anything other than its bottom line.
And of course, instead of taking action to clean up its act, Meta proposes to shift the responsibility to parents and app stores run by others, like Google and Apple. This recently led the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children to state: “…Meta has sat on its hands while knowing the harm their platforms can cause children and is now seeking to pass the buck when they should be getting their own house in order.”
Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, similarly concluded: “Instead of designing its products with kids’ safety and privacy in mind, Meta would rather push blame onto parents and other companies to obscure the damage they’ve already done to young people.”
And Josh Golin, executive director at Fairplay, a group focused on online safety of children, called Meta’s effort “another desperate attempt to avoid regulation and an incredible slap in the face to parents who have lost their kids to online harms on Instagram.”
Meta has a track record of engaging in this kind of last-minute virtue signaling in the face of increased public scrutiny. As Politico reported, in 2021, just one day before Instagram’s Mosseri was scheduled to testify in Congress on child safety, the company announced new parental controls and restrictions on teens.
So, no one should be fooled by Meta’s flashy ad campaign and claimed interest in “working with Congress” on solutions. We have seen this playbook before. If Meta and other social media companies really care about protecting children, they should start by acting themselves to clean up all the filth they enable and promote on their apps.
Steve Sherman is an author, radio commentator, and former Iowa House candidate. His articles have appeared nationally in both print and online.
