Instagram is not for kids.
Instagram for Kids is a malevolent force in direct competition with a truly free and human future for our kids.
by Joe Waters
Capita is not on Instagram and Facebook. We were once, but we decided that their values do not align with our mission of building a future in which all children and families flourish. This week they showed us once again why.
Facebook announced on September 27th that it was pausing its plans to develop an Instagram “experience” for children under the age of 13. In the statement posted about this decision, Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, wrote:
While we stand by the need to develop this experience, we’ve decided to pause this project. This will give us time to work with parents, experts, policymakers and regulators, to listen to their concerns, and to demonstrate the value and importance of this project for younger teens online today.
I would like to parse this portion of the statement because it reveals a great deal about the underlying assumptions that Facebook and other social media companies make about their products and about the human person, specifically those who are in the earliest and most formative years of life.
While we stand by the need to develop this experience
“Even if Instagram for Kids doesn’t itself have ads, developing the habit of using Instagram still serves the interests of advertisers. Instagram for Kids is self-evidently about turning our pliant kids into an army of consumers before any defenses can be developed. ”
Who needs this experience? Children whose fundamental needs -- needs too infrequently met in a society as rich as ours -- include food, shelter, stability, love, and relationship do not need any experience that Instagram can offer. The revelation in this part of the statement is that Mr. Mosseri and his colleagues confuse wants, wants generated in large part by our online media ecosystem, with needs.
Who needs this experience? Clearly, it is Facebook who needs this experience. It needs a way to monetize the attention of our children, but more fundamentally it needs to shape their wants, to form them in the habits of consumership, during some of the most sensitive periods of human development. It needs to get them addicted now, when capacities for consent and self-control are not yet fully formed.
Who needs this experience? Advertisers need this experience. While Mosseri’s statement said that there will not be ads on Instagram for Kids that doesn’t matter. Advertisers are the primary source of revenue for Facebook and there is a huge, long-term business advantage to shaping the habits and wants of our children well before those capacities for consent and self-control are more developed. Even if Instagram for Kids doesn’t itself have ads, developing the habit of using Instagram still serves the interests of advertisers. Instagram for Kids is self-evidently about turning our pliant kids into an army of consumers before any defenses can be developed.
we’ve decided to pause this project
Do not underestimate their commitment to this project. It is paused only because they got caught. After they regroup, Instagram for Kids will be back. Do not misinterpret them or lower your guard: this project will go forward. Just not now.
This will give us time to work with parents, experts, policymakers and regulators, to listen to their concerns, and to demonstrate the value and importance of this project for younger teens online today.
Which parents? Who will choose them? And by which criteria? Is the purpose of such consultation to hear from parents that Big Tech should leave their children alone? No, the concerns will be listened to, we are told, but Facebook still intends to devote resources and energy to demonstrating the “value and importance of this project.” Facebook is not on the side of parents. Once Instagram for Kids is developed and available, the want that every kid will have for the “experience” their friends are having will erode only the firmest parental capacities to resist while also creating the demand for an “experience” for younger and younger kids.
Our social media ecosystem is not morally neutral. It exercises incredible influence over the “habits, beliefs, and worldviews” that all of us who use or have used these tools develop and hold. Humans are habitual creatures and childhood is the most treasured period of life for the formation of habits, good or bad, virtues and vices. While supervision tools are useful for defending children from certain iniquitous content, it is not the content alone that’s the problem. The problem is the habits of use that are formed over time and which serve the interests of advertisers who desire, need, nothing more than for this generation and the next to have a nearly unbreakable habit stably formed in childhood of using Instagram.
These habits will not only shape the wants of children for what advertisers are selling, but they will fundamentally shape the way children see the world. What is at stake here is not just the buying and selling that makes our world of e-commerce go round and which is source of Facebook’s profitability, but the formation of a total worldview, a paradigm, even a way of seeing ourselves, and of being that serves to make consumers (not citizens) unquestionably loyal not to people, families, places, country, and ideals, but to corporations and the Mammon they serve. What’s at stake is our children’s freedom.
Facebook already has far too much control over the story of our lives. Instagram for Kids is a malevolent force in direct competition with a truly free and human future for our kids.
Joe Waters is the co-founder and CEO of Capita.
The views represented here are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the organization, staff, Board of Directors, funders, or other stakeholders.