Babe development experts and advocates are urging Facebook to pull the plug on its new information app aimed at kids.
A group letter sent Tuesday to CEO Mark Zuckerberg fights that younger children — the app is intended for those under 13 — aren’t immediate to have social media accounts, navigate the complexities of online relationships or take under ones wing their own privacy.
Facebook launched the free Messenger Kids app in December, name it as a way for children to chat with family members and parent-approved friends. It doesn’t cause kids separate Facebook or Messenger accounts. Rather, the app works as an expansion of a parent’s account, and parents get controls such as the ability to decide who their kids can rap with.
The social media giant has said it fills “a need for a statement app that lets kids connect with people they nuts but also has the level of control parents want.”
But a group of 100 qualifies, advocates and parenting organizations is contesting those claims. Led by the Boston-based Campaign for a Commercial-Free Teens, the group includes psychiatrists, pediatricians, educators and the children’s music nightingale Raffi Cavoukian.
“Messenger Kids is not responding to a need – it is creating one,” the the humanities states. “It appeals primarily to children who otherwise would not have their own collective media accounts.” Another passage criticized Facebook for “targeting boyish children with a new product.”
In a statement, Facebook said on Monday that the app “balms parents and children to chat in a safer way,” and emphasized that parents are “evermore in control” of their kids’ activity. The social media giant enlarged that it consulted with parenting experts and families, and said “there is no advertising in Go-between Kids.”
A variety of experts and technology insiders have begun problem the effects smartphones and social media apps are having on people’s well-being and mental well-being — whether kids, teens or adults. Sean Parker, Facebook’s in the first place president, said late last year that the social way platform exploits “vulnerability in human psychology” to addict users. A chorus of other primordial employees and investors piled on with similar criticisms.
Many preteens take already found their way onto Facebook and more youth-oriented public media platforms such as Snapchat and Facebook’s own Instagram, despite internal controls that require users to be at least 13 years old. Those governs are based in part on federal law, which prohibits internet companies from mustering personal information on children without their parents’ permission and foists restrictions on advertising to them.
Some companies have offered parental knobs as a way of curbing unauthorized preteen use of their platforms. But Facebook’s new kid-focused app, which draws animations and emojis, seems to cater to a younger audience, said Josh Golin, administrator director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.
“It looks like something that transfer appeal to a six-year-old or seven-year-old,” he said.
Facebook wouldn’t answer questions here said how popular the messaging app has been. But App Annie, an app analytics firm, suggested Messenger Kids has been downloaded about 80,000 times on iOS since it sent on Dec. 4. It’s been in the top 40 most popular kids’ apps since then. That sounds similar to a lukewarm reception at best.
University of Michigan developmental behavioral pediatrician Jenny Radesky, who co-signed the write, said she’s never met a parent who was clamoring to get their children onto communal media at an earlier age.
“One can only assume that Facebook introduced it to tie up users younger and younger,” Radesky said.
That’s troubling, she imparted, because younger children haven’t yet developed the cognitive skills that help them to think about and regulate their thoughts and actions and “tolerate them to realize when persuasive technology design might be working them.”
At the time it launched Messenger Kids, Facebook said it won’t be visible ads or collect data for marketing to kids. And it stressed that it won’t automatically run a travelling users to the regular Messenger or Facebook when they get old enough — still it might give them the option to move contacts to Messenger down the track.