Meta’s internal research has found that its parental controls have little effect on reducing addiction to its apps.
Meta conducted the study under project MYST, and it became public only after it was entered as evidence at a trial against Meta in February. The study found teens still exhibited compulsive behavior after the introduction of time limits and restricted access, Tech Times reported.
Meta announced it will launch parental controls on Threads this week. However, the parental controls require teens’ consent, and they can disable them at any time. This almost undermines the whole point of the controls.
“In June, the Cybersafety Research Center…tested 86 child-safety features across Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube. Every platform had a feature failure rate of at least 50%. Instagram’s was 66%. The researchers say social media harms to children ‘are not hypothetical, and that when they do occur the consequences can be irreversible,'” Tech Times said.
Data presented at the trial earlier this year also showed a historically low adoption of safety tools among teens.
In the MYST report, it concluded, “parental and household factors have little association with teens’ reported levels of attentiveness to their social media use.”
Related: Discord Rolls Out New Parent Controls, But Is It Enough to Keep Kids Safe?
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A few weeks ago, the EU concluded a two-year investigation into Facebook and Meta. It found that Meta uses addictive designs that keep users in “autopilot mode.” Its teen accounts and parental controls “failed to effectively tackle risks arising from addictive design,” and time-management features for teens “can be easily dismissed.”
Meta faces a lot of regulatory pressure. Four states are suing it for $1.4 trillion dollars — and that’s just one of many lawsuits. Amid its legal battles, it also lobbied Congress to include language in the Kids Online Safety Act that would shield it from liability.
Julia Duncan of the American Association for Justice said the change would amount to “pretty clear-cut immunity against every parent, every school district, that is seeking to hold any AI or social media company accountable for harm.”
Researchers say teens and children are especially vulnerable to social media harm. Children between the ages of 10 and 12 begin to get more satisfaction from social rewards and start to seek it out. But that dopamine is amplified greatly by social media.
Posting videos and pictures isn’t like normal social interaction. Normal interaction isn’t with lots of people at once, and you don’t get feedback like a thumbs up or thumbs down.
“After you walk away from a regular conversation, you don’t know if the other person liked it, or if anyone else liked it — and it’s over,” said Mitch Prinstein, APA’s chief science officer. “That’s not true on social media.”
Children don’t need social media, and parents should use discretion when it comes to their teens having accounts.
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