News Investigation

Facebook Unveils New Controls for Kids Using Its Platforms

Oct 2021 🇺🇸 PBS NewsHour

This October 2021 PBS NewsHour piece reports on new safety features Facebook (now Meta) announced for young users, shortly after whistleblower Frances Haugen's congressional testimony about internal research on Instagram's associations with teen wellbeing. The features included prompts encouraging teens to take breaks and alerts after repeated viewing of certain content types, plus optional parental-supervision tools. Fairplay executive director Josh Golin, quoted in the piece, said there was "tremendous reason to be skeptical," noting that teens often maintain secret accounts to evade parental oversight and questioning whether the company would follow through on implementation. He called instead for regulatory limits on algorithmic amplification and reiterated his call for Meta to permanently cancel the paused Instagram-for-kids product. TechKids Foundation includes this as a documented example of advocacy pressure-testing a platform's voluntary safety response.

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CITATION

PBS NewsHour. "Facebook Unveils New Controls for Kids Using Its Platforms." October 10, 2021. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/facebook-unveils-new-controls-for-kids-using-its-platforms

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