Meta & Children's Online SafetyChat: Girls as young as 8 start to lose self-confidence b/c of negative self image and social comparison
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████ name redacted. Different bars may be the same person or different people.
quoted in an excerpt in the archive.
Friday 9 April 2021
09:58████Your hair looks incredible today.
10:00Vaishnavi JayakumarThank you! It's in that sweet spot of 2nd day after washing
10:03████Would we consider not surfacing certain content in our rec surfaces that we know to be triggering?
10:04████The way that we've identified borderline harmful in other categories
10:04Vaishnavi JayakumarTotally we're working on a borderline ED policy right now to address this and are just kicking that off
10:04████Exactly
10:05Vaishnavi JayakumarWe had a first round of brainstorming this week that was really interesting bucketing potential types of behaviours into borderline / not-borderline
10:06████The images that sent yesterday of an explore feed is really problematic, and the ownership of that is also on us since it's an unconnected, recommended surface.
10:07Vaishnavi JayakumarYeah the challenge is that when you zoom in, any one of those photos probably wouldn't be triggering.
But in an explore grid with all these photos stacked against one another, it's pretty overwhelming
10:10Vaishnavi JayakumarThis discussion of IG profile personhood seems delightfully conceptual
10:10Vaishnavi JayakumarLike Citizens United but in 60 seconds I'm very into it
10:11████Right. That is actually where I think we should be focused as well. We want to be mindful that even calling the content borderline is sensitive. I could argue that some of the content I consume, either from fitness accounts, but also from Indian dance accounts, could be sensitive on the per post level.
But the problem is in aggregate. If we believe that a social media diet that consumes "healthy" content is what we recommend, we should build out Explore feeds that provide diverse content, still custom and ranked, but using broader signals perhaps/
10:12████Also, all of this is good tooling for when we build out IG Youth.
10:12Vaishnavi JayakumarOh yeah definitely
10:13████Girls as young as 8 start to lose self-confidence b/c of negative self image and social comparison.
It's when they become aware of their bodies vs. others.
10:14Vaishnavi JayakumarYeah and we're playing the same role today in their perception of self-identity that magazines and music videos played when we were growing up
10:14████Exactly
10:14Vaishnavi JayakumarAnd we all know how much those visuals impacted how we saw ourselves I wanted to have pin straight long hair and hated my curls
10:15████That's exactly right. And the problem i had with the intervention proposal is that the magazines had to take more ownership of what they showed in their mags knowing that young girls were the biggest consumers of their publication.
10:16████Also, one leverages user data in a way that I want us to think through holistically. It's invasive, in many ways, to know that we're analyzing the content you consumer and recommend something else. Outside of narrowly defined harmful content streams.
10:16████But i'm going to wait till i finish reading the thread
10:17████sorry the deck and the thread. I have a few lawyer friends that advocate on these issues and have talked to them in the past about social media's role
10:18Vaishnavi JayakumarThat's great totally recognise that these are very significant shifts from a product intervention perspective, which is why we want to start collecting feedback early and frequently. Also want to take this to some external advisors on the topic
10:18████there are really meaty legal issues separate and apart of the policy and public health concerns.
Largely by way of deceptiveness (which I think is something we should start to leverage more)
10:18Vaishnavi JayakumarI'm going to talk to karina about bringing in the team to one of our policy coffee hours to spend more time going into this work in depth
10:20████Who is ?
10:22Vaishnavi JayakumarHe's an engineer on the interactions integrity team he does a good amount of work on SSI