Facebook stopped the development of Instagram Kids after a report published by The Wall Street Journal about the psychological impact this App could have on teenagers.
According to the report, Facebook has studied the impact of Instagram on the mental health of its users, including adolescents, since 2019. These studies have revealed that one in three young people are highly affected by this social network, leading to disorders in food, depression, anxiety, and others.
Given the disclosure of these analyses, Instagram spoke in a statement where it acknowledged the veracity of this information and stated: “This demonstrates our commitment to understanding the complex and difficult problems that young people can struggle with, and details all the work that we do to help those who experience these problems. “
Instagram ensures that the intention of creating a children’s version is to allow parents of children under 13 to supervise and control the use of this application. This would be designed with an ideal version for them since Children receive as gifts cell phones and other mobile devices at an increasingly early age and, in turn, have access to any mobile application.
“We believe that building Instagram Kids is the right thing to do, but we are going to put this work on hold,” said Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram.
Instagram Kids would be focused on children between 10 and 12 years old, would not have ads, and would include “age-appropriate” content, under monitoring tools in time of messages and content for their parents or representatives.
“Although we put our development of Instagram Kids on hiatus, we will continue to work to allow parents to monitor their children’s accounts by expanding these tools to accounts for teenagers – 13 years and older – on Instagram,” Mosseri added.
