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Instagram and Threads are limiting political content. This is terrible for democracy
Tama Leaver, Curtin University
Meta’s Instagram and Threads apps are “slowly” rolling out a change that will no longer recommend political content by default. The company defines political content broadly as being “potentially related to things like laws, elections, or social topics”.
Users who follow accounts that post political content will still see such content in the normal, algorithmically sorted ways. But by default, users will not see any political content in their feeds, stories or other places where new content is recommended to them.
For users who want political recommendations to remain, Instagram has a new setting where users can turn it back on, making this an “opt-in” feature.
This change not only signals Meta’s retreat from politics and news more broadly, but also challenges any sense of these platforms being good for democracy at all. It’s also likely to have a chilling effect, stopping content creators from engaging politically altogether.
Politics: dislike
Meta has long had a problem with politics, but that wasn’t always the case.
In 2008 and 2012, political campaigning embraced social media, and Facebook was seen as especially important in Barack Obama’s success. The Arab Spring was painted as a social-media-led “Facebook Revolution”, although Facebook’s role in these events was widely overstated,
However, since then the spectre of political manipulation in the wake of the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal has soured social media users toward politics on platforms.
Increasingly polarised politics, vastly increased mis- and disinformation online, and Donald Trump’s preference for social media over policy, or truth, have all taken a toll. In that context, Meta has already been reducing political content recommendations on their main Facebook platform since 2021.
Instagram and Threads hadn’t been limited in the same way, but also ran into problems. Most recently, the Human Rights Watch accused Instagram in December last year of systematically censoring pro-Palestinian content. With the new content recommendation change, Meta’s response to that accusation today would likely be that it is applying its political content policies consistently.
Jakob Owens/Unsplash
How the change will play out in Australia
Notably, many Australians, especially in younger age groups, find news on Instagram and other social media platforms. Sometimes they are specifically seeking out news, but often not.
Not all news is political. But now, on Instagram by default no news recommendations will be political. The serendipity of discovering political stories that motivate people to think or act will be lost.
Combined with Meta recently stating they will no longer pay to support the Australian news and journalism shared on their platforms, it’s fair to say Meta is seeking to be as apolitical as possible.
The social media landscape is fracturing
With Elon Musk’s disastrous Twitter rebranding to X, and TikTok facing the possibility of being banned altogether in the United States, Meta appears as the most stable of the big social media giants.
But with Meta positioning Threads as a potential new town square while Twitter/X burns down, it’s hard to see what a town square looks like without politics.
The lack of political news, combined with a lack of any news on Facebook, may well mean young people see even less news than before, and have less chance to engage politically.
In a Threads discussion, Instagram Head Adam Mosseri made the platform’s position clear:
Politics and hard news are important, I don’t want to imply otherwise. But my take is, from a platform’s perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue they might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them.
Like for Facebook, for Instagram and Threads politics is just too hard. The political process and democracy can be pretty hard, but it’s now clear that’s not Meta’s problem.
A chilling effect on creators
Instagram’s announcement also reminded content creators their accounts may no longer be recommended due to posting political content.
If political posts were preventing recommendation, creators could see the exact posts and choose to remove them. Content creators live or die by the platform’s recommendations, so the implication is clear: avoid politics.
Creators already spend considerable time trying to interpret what content platforms prefer, building algorithmic folklore about which posts do best.
While that folklore is sometimes flawed, Meta couldn’t be clearer on this one: political posts will prevent audience growth, and thus make an already precarious living harder. That’s the definition of a political chilling effect.
For the audiences who turn to creators because they are perceived to be relatable and authentic, the absence of political posts or positions will likely stifle political issues, discussion and thus ultimately democracy.
How do I opt back in?
For Instagram and Threads users who want these platforms to still share political content recommendations, follow these steps:
- go to your Instagram profile and click the three lines to access your settings.
- click on Suggested Content (or Content Preferences for some).
- click on Political content, and then select “Don’t limit political content from people that you don’t follow”.
Tama Leaver, Professor of Internet Studies, Curtin University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Some Concerns about Meta’s New ‘AI Experiences’
With much fanfare, Meta announced last week that they’re rolling out all sorts of generative AI features and experiences across a range of their apps, including Instagram. AI agents in the visage of celebrities are going to exist across Meta’s apps, with image generation and manipulation affordances of all sorts hitting Instagram and Facebook in particular. At first glance, allowing generative AI tools to create and manipulate content on Instagram seems a little odd. In the book Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures I co-authored with Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin, one of the things we examined as a consistent tension within Instagram has been users holding on to a sense of authenticity whilst the whole platform is driven by a logic of templatability. Anything popular becomes a template, and can swiftly become an overused cliché. In that context, can generative AI content and tools be part of an authentic visual landscape, or will these outputs and synthetic media challenge the whole point of something being Instagrammable?
More than that, though, generative AI tools are notoriously fraught, often trained on such a broad range of indiscriminate material that they tend to reproduce biases and prejudices unless very carefully tweaked. So the claim that I was most interested in was the assertion that Meta are “rolling out our new AIs slowly and have built in safeguards.” Many generative AI features aren’t yet available to users outside the US, so for this short piece I’m focused on the generative AI stickers which have rolled out globally for Instagram. Presumably this is the same underlying generative AI system, so seeing what gets generated with different requests is an interesting experiment, certainly in the early days of a public release of these tools.
Requesting an AI sticker in Instagram for ‘Professor’ produced a pleasingly broad range of genders and ethnicities. Most generative AI image tools have initially produced pages of elderly white men in glasses for that query, so it’s nice to see Meta’s efforts being more diverse. Queries for ‘lecturer’ and ‘teacher in classroom’ were similarly diverse.
Heading in to slightly more problematic territory, I was curious how Meta’s AI tools were dealing with weapons and guns. Weapons are often covered by safeguards, so I tested ‘panda with a gun’ which produced some pretty intense looking pandas with firearms. After that I tried a term I know is blocked in many other generative AI tools, ‘child with a gun’, and saw my first instance of a safeguard demonstrably in action, with no result and a warning that ‘Your description may not follow our Community Guidelines. Try another description.’
However, as safeguards go, this is incredibly rudimentary, as a request for ‘child with a grenade’ readily produced stickers, including several variations which did, indeed, show a child holding a gun.
The most predictable words are blocked (including sex, slut, hooker and vomit, the latter relating, most likely, to Instagram’s well documented challenges in addressing disordered eating content). Thankfully gay, lesbian and queer are not blocked. Oddly, gun, shoot and other weapon words are fine by themselves. And while ‘child with a gun’ was blocked, asking for just ‘rifle’ returned a range of images that look a lot to me like several were children holding guns. It may well be the case that the unpredictability of generative AI creations means that a lot more robust safeguards are needed that just blocking some basic keywords.
Zooming out a bit, in a conversation on LinkedIN, Jill Walker Rettberg (author of the new book Machine Vision) was lamenting that one of the big challenges with generative AI trained on huge datasets is the lack of cultural specificity. As a proxy, I thought it’d be interesting to see how Meta’s AI handles something as banal as flags. Asking for a sticker for ‘US flag’ produced very recognisable versions of the stars and stripes. ‘Australia flag’ basically generated a mush of the Australian flag, always with a union jack, but with a random number of stars, or simply a bunch of kangaroos. Asking for ‘New Zealand flag’ got a similar mix, again with random numbers of stars, but also with the Frankenstein’s monster that was a kiwi (bird) with a union jack on its arse and a kiwi fruit for a head; the sort of monstrous hybrid that only a generative AI tool can create blessed with a complete and utter lack of comprehension of context! (That said when the query was Aotearoa New Zealand, quite different stickers came back.)
More problematically, a search for ‘the Aboriginal flag’ (keeping in mind I’m searching from within Australia and Instagram would know that) produced some weird amalgam of hundreds of flags, none of which directly related to the Aboriginal Flag in Australia. Trying ‘the Australian Aboriginal flag’ only made matters worse, with more union jacks and what I’m guessing are supposed to be the tips of arrows. At a time when one of the biggest political issues in Australia is the upcoming referendum on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, this complete lack of contextual awareness shows that Meta’s AI tools are incredibly US-centric at this time.
And while it might be argued that generative AI are never that good with specific contexts, trawling through US popular culture queries showed Meta’s AI tools can give incredibly accurate stickers if you’re asking for Iron Man, Star Wars or even just Ahsoka (even when the query is incorrectly spelt ‘ashoka’!).
At the moment the AI Stickers are available globally, but the broader Meta AI tools are only available in the US, so to give Meta the benefit of the doubt, perhaps they’ve got significant work planned to understand specific countries, cultures and contexts before releasing these tools more widely. Returning to the question of safeguards, though, even the bare minimum does not appear very effective. While any term with ‘sexy’ or ‘naked’ in it seems to be blocked, many variants are not. Case in point, one last example: the query ‘medusa, large breasts’ produced exactly what you’d imagine, and if I’m not mistaken, the second sticker created in the top row shows Medusa with no clothes on at all. And while that’s very different from photographs of nudity, if part of Meta’s safeguards are blocking the term ‘naked’, but their AI is producing naked figures all the same, there are clearly lingering questions about just how effective these safeguards really are.
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Instagram’s privacy updates for kids are positive. But plans for an under-13s app means profits still take precedence
Shutterstock
By Tama Leaver, Curtin University
Facebook recently announced significant changes to Instagram for users aged under 16. New accounts will be private by default, and advertisers will be limited in how they can reach young people.
The new changes are long overdue and welcome. But Facebook’s commitment to childrens’ safety is still in question as it continues to develop a separate version of Instagram for kids aged under 13.
The company received significant backlash after the initial announcement in May. In fact, more than 40 US Attorneys General who usually support big tech banded together to ask Facebook to stop building the under-13s version of Instagram, citing privacy and health concerns.
Privacy and advertising
Online default settings matter. They set expectations for how we should behave online, and many of us will never shift away from this by changing our default settings.
Adult accounts on Instagram are public by default. Facebook’s shift to making under-16 accounts private by default means these users will need to actively change their settings if they want a public profile. Existing under-16 users with public accounts will also get a prompt asking if they want to make their account private.
These changes normalise privacy and will encourage young users to focus their interactions more on their circles of friends and followers they approve. Such a change could go a long way in helping young people navigate online privacy.
Facebook has also limited the ways in which advertisers can target Instagram users under age 18 (or older in some countries). Instead of targeting specific users based on their interests gleaned via data collection, advertisers can now only broadly reach young people by focusing ads in terms of age, gender and location.
This change follows recently publicised research that showed Facebook was allowing advertisers to target young users with risky interests — such as smoking, vaping, alcohol, gambling and extreme weight loss — with age-inappropriate ads.
This is particularly worrying, given Facebook’s admission there is “no foolproof way to stop people from misrepresenting their age” when joining Instagram or Facebook. The apps ask for date of birth during sign-up, but have no way of verifying responses. Any child who knows basic arithmetic can work out how to bypass this gateway.
Of course, Facebook’s new changes do not stop Facebook itself from collecting young users’ data. And when an Instagram user becomes a legal adult, all of their data collected up to that point will then likely inform an incredibly detailed profile which will be available to facilitate Facebook’s main business model: extremely targeted advertising.
Deploying Instagram’s top dad
Facebook has been highly strategic in how it released news of its recent changes for young Instagram users. In contrast with Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, Instagram’s head Adam Mosseri has turned his status as a parent into a significant element of his public persona.
Since Mosseri took over after Instagram’s creators left Facebook in 2018, his profile has consistently emphasised he has three young sons, his curated Instagram stories include #dadlife and Lego, and he often signs off Q&A sessions on Instagram by mentioning he needs to spend time with his kids.
When Mosseri posted about the changes for under-16 Instagram users, he carefully framed the news as coming from a parent first, and the head of one of the world’s largest social platforms second. Similar to many influencers, Mosseri knows how to position himself as relatable and authentic.
Age verification and ‘potentially suspicious’ adults
In a paired announcement on July 27, Facebook’s vice-president of youth products Pavni Diwanji announced Facebook and Instagram would be doing more to ensure under-13s could not access the services.
Diwanji said Facebook was using artificial intelligence algorithms to stop “adults that have shown potentially suspicious behavior” from being able to view posts from young people’s accounts, or the accounts themselves. But Facebook has not offered an explanation as to how a user might be found to be “suspicious”.
Diwanji notes the company is “building similar technology to find and remove accounts belonging to people under the age of 13”. But this technology isn’t being used yet.
It’s reasonable to infer Facebook probably won’t actively remove under-13s from either Instagram or Facebook until the new Instagram For Kids app is launched — ensuring those young customers aren’t lost to Facebook altogether.
Despite public backlash, Diwanji’s post confirmed Facebook is indeed still building “a new Instagram experience for tweens”. As I’ve argued in the past, an Instagram for Kids — much like Facebook’s Messenger for Kids before it — would be less about providing a gated playground for children and more about getting children familiar and comfortable with Facebook’s family of apps, in the hope they’ll stay on them for life.
A Facebook spokesperson told The Conversation that a feature introduced in March prevents users registered as adults from sending direct messages to users registered as teens who are not following them.
“This feature relies on our work to predict peoples’ ages using machine learning technology, and the age people give us when they sign up,” the spokesperson said.
They said “suspicious accounts will no longer see young people in ‘Accounts Suggested for You’, and if they do find their profiles by searching for them directly, they won’t be able to follow them”.
Resources for parents and teens
For parents and teen Instagram users, the recent changes to the platform are a useful prompt to begin or to revisit conversations about privacy and safety on social media.
Instagram does provide some useful resources for parents to help guide these conversations, including a bespoke Australian version of their Parent’s Guide to Instagram created in partnership with ReachOut. There are many other online resources, too, such as CommonSense Media’s Parents’ Ultimate Guide to Instagram.
Regarding Instagram for Kids, a Facebook spokesperson told The Conversation the company hoped to “create something that’s really fun and educational, with family friendly safety features”.
But the fact that this app is still planned means Facebook can’t accept the most straightforward way of keeping young children safe: keeping them off Facebook and Instagram altogether.
Tama Leaver, Professor of Internet Studies, Curtin University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Happy birthday Instagram! 5 ways doing it for the ‘gram has changed us
Tama Leaver, Curtin University; Crystal Abidin, Curtin University, and Tim Highfield, University of Sheffield
6 October 2020 marks Instagram’s tenth birthday. Having amassed more than a billion active users worldwide, the app has changed radically in that decade. And it has changed us.
1. Instagram’s evolution
When it was launched on October 6, 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, Instagram was an iPhone-only app. The user could take photos (and only take photos — the app could not load existing images from the phone’s gallery) within a square frame. These could be shared, with an enhancing filter if desired. Other users could comment or like the images. That was it.
As we chronicle in our book, the platform has grown rapidly and been at the forefront of an increasingly visual social media landscape.
In 2012, Facebook purchased Instagram for a deal worth a $US1 billion (A$1.4 billion), which in retrospect probably seems cheap. Instagram is now one of the most profitable jewels in the Facebook crown.
Instagram has integrated new features over time, but it did not invent all of them.
Instagram Stories, with more than half a billion daily users, was shamelessly borrowed from Snapchat in 2016. It allowed users to post 10-second content bites which disappear after 24 hours. The rivers of casual and intimate content (later integrated into Facebook) are widely considered to have revitalised the app.
Similarly, IGTV is Instagram’s answer to YouTube’s longer-form video. And if the recently-released Reels isn’t a TikTok clone, we’re not sure what else it could be.
Read more: Facebook is merging Messenger and Instagram chat features. It’s for Zuckerberg’s benefit, not yours
2. Under the influencers
Instagram is largely responsible for the rapid professionalisation of the influencer industry. Insiders estimated the influencer industry would grow to US$9.7 billion (A$13.5 billion) in 2020, though COVID-19 has since taken a toll on this as with other sectors.
As early as in 2011, professional lifestyle bloggers throughout Southeast Asia were moving to Instagram, turning it into a brimming marketplace. They sold ad space via post captions and monetised selfies through sponsored products. Such vernacular commerce pre-dates Instagram’s Paid Partnership feature, which launched in late-2017.
The use of images as a primary mode of communication, as opposed to the text-based modes of the blogging era, facilitated an explosion of aspiring influencers. The threshold for turning oneself into an online brand was dramatically lowered.
Instagrammers relied more on photography and their looks — enhanced by filters and editing built into the platform.
Soon, the “extremely professional and polished, the pretty, pristine, and picturesque” started to become boring. Finstagrams (“fake Instagram”) and secondary accounts proliferated and allowed influencers to display behind-the-scenes snippets and authenticity through calculated performances of amateurism.
3. Instabusiness as usual
As influencers commercialised Instagram captions and photos, those who had owned online shops turned hashtag streams into advertorial campaigns. They relied on the labour of followers to publicise their wares and amplify their reach.
Bigger businesses followed suit and so did advice from marketing experts for how best to “optimise” engagement.
In mid-2016, Instagram belatedly launched business accounts and tools, allowing companies easy access to back-end analytics. The introduction of the “swipeable carousel” of story content in early 2017 further expanded commercial opportunities for businesses by multiplying ad space per Instagram post. This year, in the tradition of Instagram corporatising user innovations, it announced Instagram Shops would allow businesses to sell products directly via a digital storefront. Users had previously done this via links.
Read more: Friday essay: Twitter and the way of the hashtag
4. Sharenting
Instagram isn’t just where we tell the visual story of ourselves, but also where we co-create each other’s stories. Nowhere is this more evident than the way parents “sharent”, posting their children’s daily lives and milestones.
Many children’s Instagram presence begins before they are even born. Sharing ultrasound photos has become a standard way to announce a pregnancy. Over 1.5 million public Instagram posts are tagged #genderreveal.
Sharenting raises privacy questions: who owns a child’s image? Can children withdraw publishing permission later?
Sharenting entails handing over children’s data to Facebook as part of the larger realm of surveillance capitalism. A saying that emerged around the same time as Instagram was born still rings true: “When something online is free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product”. We pay for Instagram’s “free” platform with our user data and our children’s data, too, when we share photos of them.
Read more: The real problem with posting about your kids online
5. Seeing through the frame
The apparent “Instagrammability” of a meal, a place, or an experience has seen the rise of numerous visual trends and tropes.
Short-lived Instagram Stories and disappearing Direct Messages add more spaces to express more things without the threat of permanence.
Read more: Friday essay: seeing the news up close, one devastating post at a time
The events of 2020 have shown our ways of seeing on Instagram reveal the possibilities and pitfalls of social media.
In June racial justice activism on #BlackoutTuesday, while extremely popular, also had the effect of swamping the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag with black squares.
Instagram is rife with disinformation and conspiracy theories which hijack the look and feel of authoritive content. The template of popular Instagram content can see familiar aesthetics weaponised to spread misinformation.
Ultimately, the last decade has seen Instagram become one of the main lenses through which we see the world, personally and politically. Users communicate and frame the lives they share with family, friends and the wider world.
Read more: #travelgram: live tourist snaps have turned solo adventures into social occasions
Tama Leaver, Associate Professor in Internet Studies, Curtin University; Crystal Abidin, Senior Research Fellow & ARC DECRA, Internet Studies, Curtin University, Curtin University, and Tim Highfield, Lecturer in Digital Media and Society, University of Sheffield
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Facebook hoping Messenger Kids will draw future users, and their data
Facebook has always had a problem with kids.
The US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) explicitly forbids the collection of data from children under 13 without parental consent.
Rather than go through the complicated verification processes that involve getting parental consent, Facebook, like most online platforms, has previously stated that children under 13 simply cannot have Facebook accounts.
Of course, that has been one of the biggest white lies of the internet, along with clicking the little button which says you’ve read the Terms of Use; many, many kids have had Facebook accounts — or Instagram accounts (another platform wholly-owned by Facebook) — simply by lying about their birth date, which neither Facebook nor Instagram seek to verify if users indicate they’re 13 or older.
Many children have utilised some or all or Facebook’s features using their parent’s or older sibling’s accounts as well. Facebook’s internal messaging functions, and the standalone Messenger app have, at times, been shared by the named adult account holder and one or more of their children.
Sometimes this will involve parent accounts connecting to each other simply so kids can Video Chat, somewhat messing up Facebook’s precious map of connections.
Enter Messenger Kids, Facebook’s new Messenger app explicitly for the under-13s. Messenger Kids is promoted as having all the fun bits, but in a more careful and controlled space directed by parental consent and safety concerns.
To use Messenger Kids, a parent or caregiver uses their own Facebook account to authorise Messenger Kids for their child. That adult then gets a new control panel in Facebook where they can approve (or not) any and all connections that child has.
Kids can video chat, message, access a pre-filtered set of animated GIFs and images, and interact in other playful ways.
PHOTO: The app has controls built into its functionality that allow parents to approve contacts. (Supplied: Facebook)
In the press release introducing Messenger Kids, Facebook emphasises that this product was designed after careful research, with a view to giving parents more control, and giving kids a safe space to interact providing them a space to grow as budding digital creators. Which is likely all true, but only tells part of the story.
As with all of Facebook’s changes and releases, it’s vitally important to ask: what’s in it for Facebook?
While Messenger Kids won’t show ads (to start with), it builds a level of familiarity and trust in Facebook itself. If Messenger Kids allows Facebook to become a space of humour and friendship for years before a “real” Facebook account is allowed, the odds of a child signing up once they’re eligible becomes much greater.
Facebook playing the long game
In an era when teens are showing less and less interest in Facebook’s main platform, Messenger Kids is part of a clear and deliberate strategy to recapture their interest. It won’t happen overnight, but Facebook’s playing the long game here.
If Messenger Kids replaces other video messaging services, then it’s also true that any person kids are talking to will need to have an active Facebook account, whether that’s mum and dad, older cousins or even great grandparents. That’s a clever way to keep a whole range of people actively using Facebook (and actively seeing the ads which make Facebook money).
PHOTO: Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan read ‘Quantum Physics for Babies’ to their son Max. (Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg)
Facebook wants data about you. It wants data about your networks, connections and interactions. It wants data about your kids. And it wants data about their networks, connections and interactions, too.
When they set up Messenger Kids, parents have to provide their child’s real name. While this is consistent with Facebook’s real names policy, the flexibility to use pseudonyms or other identifiers for kids would demonstrate real commitment to carving out Messenger Kids as something and somewhere different. That’s not the path Facebook has taken.
Facebook might not use this data to sell ads to your kids today, but adding kids into the mix will help Facebook refine its maps of what you do (and stop kids using their parents accounts for Video Chat messing up that data). It will also mean Facebook understands much better who has kids, how old they are, who they’re connected to, and so on.
One more rich source of data (kids) adds more depth to the data that makes Facebook tick. And make Facebook profit. Lots of profit.
Facebook’s main app, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp (all owned by Facebook) are all free to use because the data generated by users is enough to make Facebook money. Messenger Kids isn’t philanthropy; it’s the same business model, just on a longer scale.
Facebook isn’t alone in exploring variations of their apps for children.
Google, Amazon and Apple want your kids
As far back as 2013 Snapchat released SnapKidz, which basically had all the creative elements of Snapchat, but not the sharing ones. However, their kids-specific app was quietly shelved the following year, probably for lack of any sort of business model.
PHOTO: The space created by Messenger Kids won’t stop cyberbullying. (ABC News: Will Ockenden )
Since early 2017, Google has also shifted to allowing kids to establish an account managed by their parents. It’s not hard to imagine why, when many children now chat with Google daily using the Google Home speakers (which, really, should be called “listeners” first and foremost).
Google Home, Amazon’s Echo and soon Apple’s soon-to-be-released HomePod all but remove the textual and tactile barriers which once prevented kids interacting directly with these online giants.
A child’s Google Account also allows parents to give them access to YouTube Kids. That said, the content that’s permissible on YouTube Kids has been the subject of a lot of attention recently.
In short, if dark parodies of Peppa Pig where Peppa has her teeth painfully removed to the sounds of screaming is going to upset your kids, it’s not safe to leave them alone to navigate YouTube Kids.
Nor will the space created by Messenger Kids stop cyberbullying; it might not be anonymous, but parents will only know there’s a problem if they consistently talk to their children about their online interactions.
Facebook often proves unable to regulate content effectively, in large part because it relies on algorithms and a relatively small team of people to very rapidly decide what does and doesn’t violate Facebook’s already fuzzy guidelines about acceptability. It’s unclear how Messenger Kids content will be policed, but the standard Facebook approach doesn’t seem sufficient.
At the moment, Messenger Kids is only available in the US; before it inevitably arrives in Australia and elsewhere, parents and caregivers need to decide whether they’re comfortable exchanging some of their children’s data for the functionality that the new app provides.
And, to be fair, Messenger Kids may well be very useful; a comparatively safe space where kids can talk to each other, explore tools of digital creativity, and increase their online literacies, certainly has its place.
Most importantly, though, is this simple reminder: Messenger Kids isn’t (just) screen time, it’s social time. And as with most new social situations, from playgrounds to pools, parent and caregiver supervision helps young people understand, navigate and make the most of those situations. The inverse is true, too: a lack of discussion about new spaces and situations will mean that the chances of kids getting into awkward, difficult, or even dangerous situations goes up exponentially.
Messenger Kids isn’t just making Facebook feel normal, familiar and safe for kids. It’s part of Facebook’s long game in terms of staying relevant, while all of Facebook’s existing issues remain.
Tama Leaver is an Associate Professor in the Department of Internet Studies at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia.
[This piece was originally published on the ABC News website.]
Strategies for Developing a Scholarly Web Presence During a Higher Degree
As part of the Curtin Humanities Research Skills and Careers Workshops 2015 I recently facilitated a workshop entitled Strategies for Developing a Scholarly Web Presence During a Higher Degree. As the workshop received a very positive response and addressed a number of strategies and issues that participants had not addressed previously, I thought I’d share the slides here in case they’re of use to others.
For more context regarding scholarly use of social media in particular, it’s worth checking out Deborah Lupton’s 2014 report ‘Feeling Better Connected’: Academics’ Use of Social Media.
Tama Leaver dot Net by Tama Leaver is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.