US senators accused Facebook executives of prioritising profits over children’s safety during a hearing that comes amid new reports about how the company’s products affect young people.
“We now know that Facebook routinely puts profits ahead of kids’ online safety,” Richard Blumenthal, Democratic chair of the Senate’s consumer protection subcommittee, said on Thursday at the beginning of a hearing focused on how to protect children online.
“We know it chooses the growth of its products over the wellbeing of our children,” he added. “And we now know that it is indefensively delinquent in acting to protect them.”
The hearing comes after the Wall Street Journal published a series of articles based on documents leaked by an unnamed whistleblower that showed Facebook’s internal researchers had allegedly found that Instagram, the company’s photo-sharing app, could have a negative impact on some teenagers’ mental wellbeing — for example, deepening their preoccupation over body image.
The report suggested the company buried those findings, despite repeated questions this year from lawmakers about how Instagram in particular affects young people.
“Facebook knows the disruptive consequences that Instagram’s design and algorithms are having on our young people in our society, but it has routinely prioritised its own rapid growth over basic safety for our children,” Blumenthal said.
Antigone Davis, Facebook’s head of global safety and the sole witness at Thursday’s hearing, defended the company and said the Journal had mischaracterised its work. “At Facebook we take the privacy, safety and wellbeing of all those who use our services very seriously, especially our younger users,” she said.
In a separate report, the Journal also said Facebook had been exploring ways to capture the pre-teen market as it struggled to retain young users amid competition from Snapchat and TikTok, citing internal company documents.
Facebook’s shares have fallen almost 10 per cent this month as it grapples with its biggest public relations crisis since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and fallout from Apple’s recent changes to its advertising-targeting policies.
Facebook has disputed the Journal’s presentation of its research, accusing the newspaper of “cherry-picking” facts. The company released two of the internal documents cited in the investigation in full late on Wednesday. This included annotations that suggested the findings were limited and, in one instance, described its own researchers’ language as “myopic”.
Davis told the committee: “One of the main presentations referenced by the Wall Street Journal included a survey of 12 issues — difficult and serious issues like loneliness, anxiety, sadness, and eating disorders . . . For 11 of the 12 issues, teen girls who were struggling were more likely to say that Instagram was affirmatively helping them, not making them worse. That was true for teen boys on 12 out of 12 issues.”
Facebook said on Tuesday that it would pause the launch of Instagram Kids, a version of the app for children under the age of 13, to give it time to incorporate feedback from policymakers, parents and child-safety campaigners.
Facebook indicated it would eventually press ahead with the plans, arguing that a separate platform could offer extra parental controls and better protect children. Users are supposed to be at least 13 years old to join Instagram or Facebook.
Davis is also likely to be asked about concerns among lawmakers that Facebook’s apps track children online, expose them to predators and are deliberately designed to be addictive in the company’s hunt for profit.
According to the Journal, Facebook researchers asked whether there was “a way to leverage play dates to drive word of hand/growth among kids?” for a messaging app for children, according to one internal document. In another, it called preteens a “valuable but untapped audience”.
“The language we used to describe the research was not well-considered — and doesn’t reflect our approach,” Facebook said.
Pressure on the company is unlikely to let up soon. The whistleblower, who recently met several members of Congress, is set to reveal her identity on news programme 60 minutes on Sunday. She will also testify at another Senate hearing next week.