By David Shepardson and Elizabeth Culliford
(Reuters) -Instagram head Adam Mosseri on Wednesday urged the creation of an industry body to determine best practices to help keep young people safe online, as he was grilled by lawmakers in his first appearance before Congress.
Mosseri, speaking before a Senate panel, said the industry body should receive input from civil society, parents, and regulators to create standards on how to verify age, design age-appropriate experiences, and build parental controls.
Photo-sharing app Instagram and its parent company Meta Platforms Inc, formerly Facebook, have come under intense scrutiny over the potential impact of their services on the mental health, body image and online safety of young users. In his opening remarks, Senator Richard Blumenthal said the time for self-regulation was over.
Mosseri said companies like Instagram should have to adhere to standards by the proposed industry body to “earn” some of its Section 230 protections, referring to a key U.S. internet law which offers tech platforms protections from liability over content posted by users.
Lawmakers, who have held a series of hearings on children’s online safety, pushed Mosseri for more specific answers on what legislative reforms he would support around kids’ online safety, including on targeted advertising and on transparency around tech platforms’ algorithms.
Instagram, since September, has suspended plans for a version of the app for kids, amid growing opposition to the project.
The pause followed a Wall Street Journal report that said internal documents, leaked by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, showed the company knew Instagram could have harmful mental health effects on teens.
Mosseri, speaking at the hearing, echoed the company’s previous statements that public reporting mischaracterized the internal research. He did not commit to making permanent the pause on a kids-focused version of Instagram.
He also touted product announcements Instagram made on Tuesday on young users’ safety, but Senator Marsha Blackburn called the updates “too little too late,” while Senator Blumenthal referred to the changes, like Instagram’s pause on its kids app, as a “public relations tactic.”
Instagram, like other social media sites, has rules against children under 13 joining the platform but has said it knows it has users this age. In his testimony, Mosseri called for more age verification technology at a phone level, rather than by individual tech platforms, so users have an “age-appropriate experience.”
(Reporting by David Shepardson, Elizabeth Culliford and Diane Bartz; Editing by Franklin Paul, Mark Porter, Bernadette Baum and Aurora Ellis)
