Meta called on US lawmakers on Wednesday to regulate Google and Apple’s app stores to better protect children, the same day the Senate launched an investigation into Meta’s failures to protect children using its platforms.
In a blog post titled “Parenting in a Digital World Is Hard. Congress Can Make It Easier,” Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety, called for federal legislation that would require app stores to notify parents when a child between the ages of 13 and 16 downloads an app and to ask for parental consent. Children under 13 are already prohibited from creating accounts and downloading apps without parental consent.
Meta’s blog post does not mention Google or Apple by name, but the two operate the world’s largest smartphone app stores, the Play Store for Android and the App Store for the iPhone’s iOS. Any legislation to regulate children’s app downloads would target both.
Davis argued that there is a “better way” to regulate smartphone and internet use than laws that require a parent’s thumbs up for a child to create a social media account. Utah, for example, began requiring parental consent for under-18s to use TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and other apps in March to, in the words of the state’s governor, Spencer Cox, “preserve the mental health of our youth”.
Davis’s call was published on the same day that the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, asking him to “provide documents related to senior executives’ knowledge of the mental and physical health harms associated with its platforms, including Facebook and Instagram”. The letter requests the documents by 30 November. Neither Google, Apple nor Meta responded by press time.
The Senate committee’s preliminary inquiry comes a week after a former senior Meta employee testified before its members about the harm Instagram can do to children, including his own daughter. He said Meta executives ignored his concerns when he raised them internally.
Arturo Bejar, a former director of engineering at Instagram, told the senators: “I come before you today as a father with first-hand experience of a child who received unwanted sexual advances on Instagram.”
The same issue was central to the testimony of another Meta whistleblower, Frances Haugen, who leaked internal documents to the US government about how company executives ignored warnings about the harmful effects of social media use on teenage girls. She testified to Congress in October 2021.
