After years of accusations about Instagram’s impact on teens, and refutations of the same from Meta, the company is looking to allow researchers to conduct an in-depth study of the platform’s impacts on young users, as part of a new expansion of its restrictive research program.
As reported by The Atlantic, Meta’s planning “a small pilot program” that will enable researchers to access IG usage data in order to analyze how app usage affects teens.
As per The Atlantic:
“The company will announce today that it is seeking proposals that focus on certain research areas – investigating whether social-media use is associated with different effects in different regions of the world, for example – and that it plans to accept up to seven submissions. Once approved, researchers will be able to access relevant data from study participants – how many accounts they follow, for example, or how much they use Instagram and when.”
According to the report, Meta will still keep some data locked down, including user-demographic information and specific post info. But the idea, conceptually at least, is that Meta is moving to provide more insight into IG usage, which will either confirm or dispel the concept that Instagram is bad for teens.
This comes three years after The Wall Street Journal published a blockbuster report which, based on leaked documents from Meta, suggested that the company’s internal research had indicated that Instagram was harmful for teen girls specifically, but that it chose to ignore the findings, in favor of driving more usage. That report eventually saw Meta called before Congress to answer for its efforts.
In response, Meta denied WSJ’s findings, and the validity of the report’s findings as well, explaining that it was only a small-scale research project designed to help guide product decisions. It is not, Meta claimed, indicative of broad-scale impacts.
But many other studies have also found the same, that Instagram can have negative impacts on teens, with negative comparison and bullying among the chief concerns identified by mental health professionals.
Hopefully, then, these new research projects will help to uncover the truth, and then help Meta to better align its policies to offer more protection for teens. The platform is continually adding more tools to facilitate such, and ideally, with more information to go on, it will be even better equipped to provide the right options to help young users avoid harm.
The Instagram study will be operated by the Center for Open Science, which will ensure that Meta is not directly responsible for the publication of the results.
Again, Meta’s kept its data locked down since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but hopefully, this is step in a new direction for the company.
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