Instagram- two likes don’t save a child
Instagram, as of July 2021, is the fourth most popular social media platform with 1.386 billion active users in that month, only to be beaten by the giants of Whatsapp, YouTube and Facebook. With about 1/7th of the world being a part of this community platform, we can’t even begin to imagine the amount of content that is being uploaded- and furthermore the amount of moderation that is being performed by their human moderators due this vast amount of media, images, text and video.
While we do feel there are shortcomings by Instagram and the other large social platforms when it comes to protecting their users, especially children, from experiencing harmful and inappropriate content on these channels, the impact that moderating has on their staff who are having to deal with what can only be described as a colossal amount of content with 1, 074 uploads per second is also a major issue.
However, it is important to highlight when platforms like Instagram do take steps in safeguarding their users, and at the end of July it was reported that the platform would by default make new accounts that belonged to under 16s private. This means that only followers they approve can see posts, like and comment, and message them, which is great when initial findings showed that only one in five new users opted for a public account when the private setting was the default. On top of that, existing users will be notified stating the benefits of moving to a private account over a public one.
Furthermore, Instagram has spoken about making an under-13s version of the app, stating that this young group of children are already online so they wish to build a platform for them that is controlled by their parents and carers, as there is no way of determining their real age after there were claims that Facebook, who is Instagram’s parent company was said to be developing artificial-intelligence that find and remove under-age accounts.
This communication is confusing because I am sure like us you can see the cracks in their plans. Firstly, although the idea of making the under-16s accounts defaultly private is good, surely this doesn’t stop them from changing it? Also, like Facebook have even said themselves there is no way to 100% verify the ages of these children a quick slip of the finger from 2006 to 2005 would make all the difference. Very recently there have been petitions spreading across social media, shared by influencers and the like, asking for identification to be necessary when making social media accounts to verify age. If this goes ahead it is definitely a great step towards making social media channels safer, healthier and more honest environments.
Instagram in particular has also come under a lot of scrutiny with regards to removing harmful content- or should I say, the lack of removal. The Online Safety Bill, which we as a company are advocates for and extremely passionate about, is hopefully just the first step in holding these massive companies accountable for their action, or once again lack of. The risk of creating a children’s only Instagram site for us, and many others like us including parents, is simply too dangerous with verification through ID, but even then with people being able to make fake IDs for years to get in to nightclubs and bars, some serious work will need to happen in order to find the imposters who could potentially bring harm to not only the platform, but the children using it.
