Instagram to Take Steps to Protect Teens: WSJ

Social media giant Instagram says it is taking steps to protect teenagers on its platform.

The Wall Street Journal reports,

Starting this week, it [Instagram] will begin automatically making youth accounts private, with the most restrictive settings. And younger teens won’t be able to get around it by changing settings or creating adult accounts with fake birth dates.

Account restrictions for teens include direct messaging only with people they follow or are already connected to, a reduction in adult-oriented content, automatic muting during nighttime hours and more.

Instagram is owned by Meta — the same company that owns Facebook. The social media giant has faced criticism for exposing children to objectionable content, and policymakers around the country are pushing for stronger protections for kids as a result.

Last year, lawmakers in Arkansas enacted the Social Media Safety Act — a good law by Sen. Tyler Dees (R – Siloam Springs) and Rep. Jon Eubanks (R – Paris) requiring major social media companies to ensure minors don’t access social media platforms without parental consent. A social media company that violated the law could be held liable.

Tech giants — including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok — as well as the ACLU have worked to block that good law in court.

This year lawmakers in New York and in Florida passed similar laws protecting children on social media.

Last year Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin’s office filed a lawsuit against Meta in Polk County Circuit Court more than a year ago alleging the company has misled the public about the safety and addictiveness of its social media platforms.

The lawsuit alleges Meta structured Facebook and Instagram “to exploit multiple neuropsychological traits in youth.”

It notes that Facebook and Instagram are built around algorithms intentionally designed “to exploit human psychology and foster addiction to maximize users’ screen time.”

The A.G.’s legal complaint says this exploitation is especially true of young users with developing brains.

The lawsuit also says that, “youth mental health problems have advanced in lockstep with the growth of social media platforms that have been deliberately designed to attract and addict youth by amplifying harmful material, dosing users with dopamine hits, and thereby driving youth engagement and advertising revenue.”

Social media platforms aren’t just websites. These are multibillion dollar businesses owned and operated by adults.

The adults who run these social media platforms should not be able to register children as users and promote content to them without — at the very least — parental consent. 

As we have said before, there’s mounting evidence that social media puts users’ personal information at risk and is actually designed to push objectionable content to users. With that in mind, it is essential to protect children on social media.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.

WSJ Report Highlights Election Misinformation on Chinese-Owned TikTok

A recent report in The Wall Street Journal highlights election misinformation on social media.

The article discusses how social media giant TikTok let accounts linked to the Chinese government spread misleading content targeting U.S. voters ahead of the 2024 election.

TikTok boasts approximately one billion users worldwide — including 135 million or more in the U.S. — making it one of the most popular social media platforms on earth.

However, TikTok and its Chinese-based parent company ByteDance, have come under fire for serving kids a steady “diet of darkness” online and struggling to protect private user data from entities in China, such as the Chinese Communist Party.

The Wall Street Journal‘s report reveals how social media accounts posed as conservative news outlets, sharing videos that mischaracterized elected leaders like President Biden.

Even though TikTok has policies against fake accounts, the article points out that enforcement was slow, allowing misleading content to reach millions of users before being taken down.

All of this underscores the concerns many have expressed in the past about how TikTok might be used to to spread Chinese propaganda.

In 2022, U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security sharing concerns about TikTok’s operations in the U.S., saying in part,

TikTok captures vast amounts of private information on users, including American citizens, and has long been suspected of providing the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] with potential access to that information. This threatens the safety and security of American citizens, and also functions as an avenue for the Chinese government to track the locations of and develop blackmail on Federal employees and contractors.

U.S. Congressman Bruce Westerman wrote in March,

Although TikTok executives claim that it does not share any data collected by the app, there are several Chinese laws in place that provide CCP [Chinese Communist Party] officials access to all user data collected by Chinese-owned tech companies, like TikTok. This means the CCP has access to sensitive data, like the location of every TikTok user worldwide, including the over 210 million Americans who have downloaded the app.

Last year Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin filed two lawsuits against TikTok and its parent company ByteDance.

The A.G.’s lawsuits allege that TikTok and ByteDance failed to fully disclose that the company is subject to Chinese laws that mandate cooperation with intelligence activities of the People’s Republic of China and that TikTok aggressively collects sensitive user data.

Social media platforms are more than just websites or phone apps. These are multimillion dollar businesses owned and operated by investors and other interests. If the Chinese Communist Party can influence TikTok, the CCP may be able to manipulate content and influence users on one of the world’s largest social media platform. That’s a serious concern.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.

Federal Government Sues TikTok Over Alleged Child Privacy Violations

On Friday the United States Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against social media giant TikTok and its parent company for allegedly violating federal laws intended to protect children online.

TikTok boasts approximately one billion users worldwide — including 135 million or more in the U.S. — making it one of the most popular social media platforms on earth.

However, TikTok and its Chinese-based parent company, ByteDance, have come under fire for serving kids a steady “diet of darkness” online and struggling to protect private user data from entities in China, such as the Chinese Communist Party.

In a lawsuit filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, the U.S. Department of Justice alleged that TikTok and ByteDance violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 — a federal law that helps protect children from being tracked online.

The lawsuit accuses TikTok of “unlawful massive-scale invasions of children’s privacy,” saying,

TikTok collects, stores, and processes vast amounts of data from its users, who include millions of American children younger than 13. . . . For years, Defendants [TikTok and ByteDance] have knowingly allowed children under 13 to create and use TikTok accounts without their parents’ knowledge or consent, have collected extensive data from those children, and have failed to comply with parents’ requests to delete their children’s accounts and personal information.

This is not the first lawsuit TikTok has faced for failing to protect children on its platform.

Last year Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin filed two lawsuits against the tech giant — one in Cleburne County and another in Union County — for violating the Arkansas Deceptive Trade Practices Act and failing to protect children.

The lawsuits allege that TikTok and ByteDance failed to fully disclose that the company is subject to Chinese laws that mandate cooperation with intelligence activities of the People’s Republic of China, and that TikTok’s algorithm deliberately promotes “intensely sexualized” content — including content that sexualizes children. The A.G.’s legal team has pointed out that objectionable content is even available to users who enable TikTok’s content filtering in the app, and that TikTok aggressively collects sensitive user data.

Social media platforms are more than just websites or phone apps. These are multimillion dollar businesses owned and operated by investors and other interests. The adults who own these companies have a responsibility to follow state and federal laws and to protect children on their platforms.

As we have said before, there’s more and more evidence that social media platforms like TikTok put users’ personal information at risk and are actually designed to push objectionable content to users.

With that in mind, it’s good to see the Department of Justice taking legal action to fight back against these tech companies and protect our children online.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.