• by Colin Kirkland , July 19, 2024

After years of criticism surrounding the emotional, behavioral and psychological effects Meta's apps have on younger users, the tech giant has decided to open a small pilot program that would allow a handful of academic researchers to access Instagram data for up to six months, with the goal of learning more about how the social platform affects the well-being of teens and young adults, reports TheAtlantic.

On Wednesday of this week, Meta announced that it is looking for proposals that focus on specific research areas around this topic, and 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,” The Atlantic explains. “Meta has said that certain types of data will be off-limits, such as user-demographic information and the content of media published by users; a full list of eligible data is forthcoming, and it is as yet unclear whether internal information related to ads that are served to users or Instagram's content-sorting algorithm, for example, might be provided.”

The initiative will be run by the nonprofit Center for Open Science (COS) and researchers will be in charge of recruiting the teens, which will require parental consent and privacy precautions.

Despite the tech company allowing researchers to examine Instagram data, Meta will keep some of the data off-limits, including user-demographic information and specific post info.

Meta's decision to allow access to at least some of its user data may be sparked by the recent insistence that social media is contributing to a widespread mental health crisis among young people. Last month, the U.S. surgeon general Vivek H. Murthy wrote an op-ed in TheNew York Times, stating that social media use may double the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms and require a warning label to curb overuse and remind parents they haven’t been proven to be safe.

According to the Digital Wellness Lab, nearly half of adolescents say social media makes them feel worse about their bodies. The majority of teens are on Instagram, with 8% saying they use the app “almost constantly,” and a Gallup poll shows that the average daily use among younger users, last summer, was almost 5 hours.

“As this topic has heated up, we have felt like we needed to find a way to share data in a responsible way, in a privacy-preserving way,” Curtiss Cobb, a vice president of research at Meta told The Atlantic. “It's reasonable for people to have these questions. If we have the data that can illuminate it, and it can be shared in a responsible way, it's in all of our interests to do that.”

Aside from overuse, teens on Instagram are also falling victim to sextortion scams and harmful sexualized content. Last month, The Wall Street Journal and Northeastern University professor Laura Edelson discovered that Instagram was recommending sexual content in the form Reels to 13-year-old users who showed interested in “racy content,” proving that the app continues to foist adult content onto minors even after Meta said in January that it began restricting “sensitive content” from teens’ in-app experience. According to The Journal, Meta's own safety staff ran tests and came up with similar results in the past but denied the validity of their findings.

Three years prior, The Journal published a major report highlighting leaked documents from Meta suggesting the company’s knowledge of the harm Instagram was doing to younger users, especially teen girls. Meta was then called before Congress to answer for its efforts, but ultimately denied the report’s findings.

In addition, last year, dozens of states filed lawsuits against major social media companies for taking advantage of younger users. In October 2023, 33 attorneys general accused Meta of misleading the public about the “substantial dangers” of its Facebook and Instagram apps, which they said violated the federal children's privacy law for monetary gains.

Apart from Instagram, the company has received flack for loosening its age requirements for Quest headset users in its virtual reality (VR) metaverse gaming platform Horizon Worlds and planning to allow children to connect with others in immersive environments/a>, which have been tested significantly less in relation to mental health effects than apps like Instagram.