This petition calls on Facebook to commit to re-deploying existing functionality across all social platforms, along with any future acquisitions, to protect young and more vulnerable users from bullying and harassment online.

In May 2017, the Royal Society for Public Health published a report titled 'Instagram Ranked Worst for Young People’s Mental Health.'

Findings included:

• Social media use is linked with increased rates of anxiety, depression and poor sleep.
• 91% of people aged 16-24 use the internet for social networking.
• Anxiety and depression in young people have risen 70% in the past 25 years.
• 7 in 10 young people have already experienced cyber-bullying.

Four years later, on July 27th this year, the WSJ published an article titled 'Instagram Adds More Protections for Teenagers.' The content of which focused on making the user accounts of teenagers private by default, along with the removal of adverts within the platform for teenage users.

Unfortunately, adverts are a small part of the wider problems and challenges that young people face on the internet, particularly social media. Additionally, we know that many young internet users lie about their age to get around online restrictions - simply because they can.

WSJ then published this article, on September 14th, revealing research and analyses conducted by Facebook around how their own Instagram app affects young users. The article confirms that 'for the past three years, Facebook has been conducting studies into how its photo-sharing app affects its millions of young users. Repeatedly, the company’s researchers found that Instagram is harmful to a sizable percentage of them, most notably teenage girls.'

Key findings:

• "32% of teenage girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.” (source: March 2020 slide presentation posted to Facebook's internal message board)

• "We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls” (source: slide from 2019 which summarised research about teen girls who experience said issues)

• "Teenagers blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression and confirmed that this response was unprompted and consistent across all groups" (source: another 2019 slide)

Commercial facts:

• More than 40% of Instagram’s users are 22 years old and younger
• 22 million teenagers log onto Instagram in the U.S. every day.
• Expanding its base of young users is described as vital to the company, which already makes over $100 billion in annual revenue.
• Any big changes made could jeopardise young people's engagement with the platforms.

 

What do Facebook say?

In public, Facebook has consistently played down the app’s negative effects on teenage users and has not made its research public or available to academics or lawmakers who have asked for it.

At a congressional hearing in March 2021, when asked about children and mental health, Mark Zuckerberg said “The research that we’ve seen is that using social apps to connect with other people can have positive mental health benefits." Statements like this are vague and non-specific.

In May 2021, Instagram head Adam Mosseri told reporters that research he had seen suggests the app’s effects on teen well-being is likely “quite small.”

Mosseri also said, in an interview this year: “In no way do I mean to diminish these issues. Some of the issues mentioned in this story aren’t necessarily widespread, but their impact on people may be huge.” But the data shows that the issues are widespread.

Mosseri has also said that 'Some features of Instagram could be harmful to some young users, and they aren’t easily addressed, he said. He added: “There’s a lot of good that comes with what we do.”

 

What about the reporting and the existing Community Guidelines?

Most reports of breaches of Instagram Community Guidelines are not reviewed by the dedicated team, due to the high volume of reports that they receive. Instead, these are processed through AI for keywords and the majority of the negativity slips through the cracks (source: writer's own support request history).

I encourage you reading this to report 10 instances of genuine bullying and/or harassment on Instagram, to see for yourself how few are addressed and action taken. Most reports are found to not be a breach of Community Guidelines. Users can, of course, choose to escalate, but this is simply more onus and responsibility on us as individuals rather than on the platform and company in charge.

 

What about Identity Verification?

At present, the document-related identity-checking within Instagram is applied to 'inauthentic behaviour' and professes to aid in spotting 'bots and others trying to mislead users' because they 'want the content to come from real people' More on this here.

Unfortunately, real people are the problem. Real people bullying and harassing each other on the internet. On social media platforms.

 

What can Facebook do?

We suggest that Adam Mosseri and/or the big boss Mark Z urgently commit to doing one of the following:

• Roll out existing Identity Verification processes to all users under 22 *
• Implement the functionality which identifies mentions of covid-19 to bullying and harassment **

Ideally, they should do both.

* How Facebook's own research categorised 'young users'.

** Instagram users recently saw the quick implementation of such functionality with any mention of 'covid-19' or 'vaccine'. More information can be found here. This could be re-deployed for monitoring and pro-actively addressing instances of bullying and harassment. This technology should continually improve and get smarter, in order to detect non-typical but negative language used to bully or harass online.

 

Conclusion:

Facebook and subsidiaries have a responsibility to users, particularly young users. Parents cannot predict what strangers, or even those familiar to their children, will do. Thankfully, there is an abundance of improvement to be made in how the most-used social media platforms can monitor and address bullying and harassment online.

Thank you for reading.