Adam Mosseri: "We kicked off a bunch of work in 2017 that ended up being mostly folded into MSI. It was largely a research effort with some support from me to turn it into experiences. There are researchers both in Core Data Science (mostly ████) and the Facebook app that are experts in this area and work on it.
Later there was a desire to push this work further, so we hired a PM named ████, he came from headspace. At that moment Tom broke apart the Compassion team. The memorialization work moved, so were other chunks. We held onto the research aspect to make sure we understood the work, but the PM lacked real structural support.
Early 2019 Chris Cox was looking into us doing more on this, came to David Ginsberg and asked him what it would take to 10x well-being, which resulted in a plan that was reviewed with Chris Cox and Sheryl Sandberg and then was submitted to Mark as an incremental ask, maybe ~10 engineering and ~15 XFN. They were told to do this, but self-fund, which ended up punted given other ambiguities."
"Chris Cox, who was the most effective advocate for the work, left the company. It sort of fell on David Ginsberg afterwards, but he was more of a spokesperson and ended up taking a new role.
Since David Ginsberg took the Choice and Competition role about who is going to take the lead on well-being since he left. Since then Mark has had meetings with external experts who have been focused on teen well-being. As a side note Margaret has been trying to get traction as it connects to her responsible innovation work stream.
The team was more focused on Facebook because most of the scrutiny was on Facebook, but that may change as people shift attention to Instagram and teens. That said the research team has been focused on the Facebook app and Instagram."
Fidji Simo: "Don't disagree but I want to make sure we first agree on the problems we are trying to solve before we jump to solutions.
My sense is that the main problem is that we need to increase investment, not lack of coordination / centralization. On investment, I plan to do a big reshuffle in Oct/Nov once we know what Mark will give us to free up some heads to staff a few key things and WB is on the list. I could even find a way to do it earlier.
But let's agree first on what the problems are."
Adam Mosseri: "100% agree. My current take is the biggest problem is: Well-being is the existential question we face, and we lack a strong understanding of our effects on people's well-being as well as roadmap of work that demonstrates we care about well-being.
From there most my sense is most of issues are around execution, things like staffing, but given this team is in your organization right now I want to be sensitive about articulating these."
████: "so if we get the nielsen results back, if they are good would we publish or is there no intention of publishing?"
████: "we CAN publish -- we just aren't planning on it"
████: "ok. and just curious, do we think the results will be that negative? ive got to think that even if slightly negative they wont be THAT bad...i feel like all the well being research ive seen if it says FB isnt good for people it's always jsut like a smalllllll percentage over neutral"
████: "that is correct"
████: "idk maybbe im being naive but i feel like that this will bbe fine"
████: "I think we'll see some positive
some negative"
████: "yeah i agree"
████: "and most neutral
and anything positive or negative will be small
FB is just a minor piece of people's lives
it's an hour amongst 24"
████: "yeah for sure"
████: "and this is just a week without it"
████: "someone just said to me if the results are bad and we dont publish and they leak is it going to look like tobacco companies doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves"
████: "i went...oh"
████: "no because we will do something about it
i don't want to work at a company that's long-term bad for people, i don't think many of us do"
[(1) Stretching Out Value (AKA Spence distortion)]:
"Stretching value could occur in Facebook products in a few ways."
1. "In notifications we limit the amount of information, because we want people to come onto the site. Our notifications have moved towards an uninformative model — we now give notifications like 'someone commented on your post,' without telling you who, or giving the text of the comment. We discovered with experiments that this increases engagement, though it very likely harms user-value."
"There are reasons to worry about self-control and use of our products. I think the biggest problems people have are: (1) compulsive use, to fill gaps in their time, and they end up spending more time than they'd like, instead of spending time with their families, or studying; (2) unhealthily fixating on other people – most prototypically, compulsively looking up the profile of your ex-partner."
"Higher Facebook use is correlated with worse psychological states (wellbeing, loneliness, etc.), although changes in Facebook use are uncorrelated with changes in wellbeing measures. It's also worth noting that higher Facebook use is typically positively associated with higher MSI, and is associated with people saying that Facebook has more value."
"An experiment found that a 1-month break from Facebook improved self-reported wellbeing. There is some legitimate doubt around how to interpret this experiment, unfortunately it's the only high-quality experiment that I'm aware of."
"A large fraction of users struggle with their Facebook/Instagram use. Among US teens '84% had taken a break from social media, and 74% have taken a break from Instagram.' 'More than a third of the survey respondents feel they have spent more time than they would have liked on Instagram. About one in five respondents think they have a problem controlling their time.'"
"A significant minority report 'problematic use'. 3.1% of Facebook users in the U.S. report 'serious problems with sleep, work, or relationships that they attribute to Facebook AND concerns or preoccupations about how they use Facebook.'"
"We started discussing hiding likes in December 2017 after a joint policy and well-being roundtable in LA to solicit feedback from the community – the discussion revealed how big of negative impact like counts were having, especially on young creators. This led us to make it an ask for the well-being team to explore in May 2018 as part of H2 planning process. From my ask to Ameet:"
"PROBLEM: as well as a broader sense that Instagram has created a #FOMO culture and a need to be perfect, there is a trend and pressure among teenagers to get the most likes possible on content, and an apparent corresponding impact on mental health / anxiety levels."
"We also know that follower numbers are something that kids really care about and get anxious about. Is there a way that only the account holder can see that?"
"WHY IT MATTERS: Policy advocates are increasingly raising this trend with us, and the theme of FOMO and pressure continues to build in the press."
"Overall, teens have significantly more negative experiences than adults. Perceived reach was higher among teens than adults for 11 out of the 18 problem areas that we asked about."
"Overall, the perceived reach of negative experiences on Instagram is quite high. Almost half of respondents reported seeing a suspicious account or commercial spam in the last week; seeing misinformation and experiencing inauthentic engagement are also common."
"Seeing someone get bullied or harassed, seeing terrorist content, and seeing SSI content top the list in terms of intensity: more than half of people who've encountered these problems rate them as Very Bad Experiences."
"In general, more intense experiences have lower reach, while less intense experiences have higher reach. SSI, terrorism, and seeing someone being bullied or harassed are particularly problematic, with high reach for how intense they are."
"Explore and Profile are each the most common surface for 5 out of 16 negative experiences. In addition, Direct is the most common surface to encounter suspicious accounts, and to experience bullying and solicitation. People most commonly see drug sales and SSI in Stories, and see spam in Feed."
"On Instagram, mental health issues impact one of our core demographics (teens and younger users), as they generally demonstrate lower well-being. Mental health issues are also a leading driver of well-being complaints related to Instagram."
"Social media is often not the cause of problems related to mental health. However, it can and does both attenuate or exacerbate a user's experience with mental health issues."
"5 graphs about reporting (POC: ████): I looked back at some survey data from the Negative Experiences survey (NETS) I ran in May, focusing on the question of whether people reported the negative experience that they had ('Did you report this problem to Instagram?'). I found that intensity predicts self-reported reporting: more intense problem types have a higher self-reported report rate. Furthermore, there are three distinct clusters of problems: 1) low-intensity & low-report (in blue), 2) high-intensity & high-report (in purple), and 3) very high-intensity yet only medium-report (in pink) — this outlier group contains seeing others getting bullied and seeing SSI content, which may be problems where witnesses aren't sure that it's their place to intervene despite being very upset."
"Feedback on Restrict: A mixed methods study on the use and usability of Restrict (POC: ████): The goal of this research was to understand the use and impact of Restrict after launching to 5% English speakers worldwide. Overall, we found that users: 1) used Restrict primarily in response to unwanted contacts and insults against known actors, 2) Compared to Block, Restrict was harder to find - Users commonly discovered Restrict in Profile when looking for block, 3) Compared to Block, Restrict was significantly harder to understand and was a key barrier to use. In interviews, most users could not fully describe how Restrict worked. Success was commonly attributed to functions not included in Restrict (e.g., decreased visibility or inability to DM)."
[Upcoming Research]:
"Bullying on Direct survey (POC ████) - The top surface for experiencing bullying is Direct. What does bullying on Direct look like? This project is aimed at sizing different bullying patterns on Direct — what types of bullying occur, how much bullying is from known contacts vs. strangers, where bullying originates from (entry point), how much involves rich media, and what tools people engage when they're bullied."
1. "PROACTIVE ENFORCEMENT -- How important is it that we proactively enforce based on age (i.e., try to detect and challenge people lying about their age)?"
[a. Background]:
• "We have recommended that, by 2021, we use machine learning models to proactively enforce if we believe a minor (<13) is falsifying their age. This is one of the main areas of concern we've heard from regulators/policy makers, and it is more likely to drive concern in the near term than questions about how we enforce across FB/IG/WA."
• "While there is consensus that we should pursue proactive enforcement, the Integrity team is concerned about limited resources and is asking for guidance on how the policy team prioritizes this against other priorities."
• "The Product Policy team previously prioritized areas for Integrity work."
◦ "Age enforcement could fall under 'Authentic Age: False DOB' (which is listed as low severity) or 'protection of minors' (which includes removal of minors based on user request and is listed as very high severity)."
◦ "Even with a 'very high severity,' at current staffing Integrity estimates this would not be worked on until late 2020 or 2021 at the earliest and would require a substantial investment."
[b. Recommendation]:
i. "We agree with the Product Policy team that this issue should be classified as 'very high severity,' but need guidance on how to rank against other policy priorities."
ii. "Proactive enforcement is our most important policy goal in this area -- so although there's substantive agreement we should do this we recommend flagging for Mark that it's not currently staffed and asking for additional resources to support this work in 2020."
2. "CROSS-APP ENFORCEMENT -- If we enforce against a FB account for being underage, under what circumstances should we enforce against IG/WA accounts that we believe are co-owned?"
[ii. Recommendation]:
• "Option 3."
◦ "General justification: It is difficult to defend the use of inferred account links for advertising purposes without also using these links for age management"
▪ "Product will likely push back on this by pointing out that the consequences of showing the wrong ad to someone is relatively low compared with the consequence of being checkpointed as an underage account."
▪ "However, taking this position will invite criticism that we are putting profits over people."
3. "[for visibility only] AGE GATING METHOD: How much flexibility do we have in designing the age gate at registration, so that it stops <13s but doesn't block older people legitimately trying to create an account?"
a. "Background: Growth is pushing on how flexible our age gating mechanisms can be to mitigate growth impact. The key change we have recommended is changing the default age on FB during registration from 25 to something less than 13. We have also recommended blocking people after their 2nd failure to enter a valid age. Growth estimates an impact of -14M MAP/year on FB and -14M MAP/year on IG [lower confidence estimate]."
Body image & eating disordersSuicide & self-injury
"The perfect image, feeling attractive, and having enough money are the most likely to have started on Instagram"
[Started on Instagram, US n = 565; UK n = 557]:
• Have to create the perfect image: US "39%", UK "51%"
• Not attractive: US "41%", UK "43%"
• Don't have enough money: US "42%", UK "42%"
• Don't have enough friends: US "32%", UK "33%"
• Not good enough: US "24%", UK "29%"
• Friends aren't really their friends: US "24%", UK "25%"
• Have to be happy: US "17%", UK "27%"
• Alone or lonely: US "21%", UK "18%"
• Down, sad, or depressed: US "10%", UK "13%"
• Can't be honest about their: US "8%", UK "13%"
• Wanted to kill themselves: US "6%", UK "13%"
• Wanted to hurt themselves: US "9%", UK "7%"
"Of the things you've felt in the past month, did any of them start on Instagram? Please select all that apply"
"One in five teens say that Instagram makes them feel worse about themselves, with UK girls the most negative"
Stated effect of Instagram, as the chart prints it (Much worse / Somewhat worse / No effect / Somewhat better / Much better): US Total 3% / 16% / 41% / 29% / 12%; US Boys 2% / 12% / 37% / 32% / 18%; US Girls 3% / 18% / 43% / 29% / 8%; UK Total 2% / 19% / 46% / 28% / 5%; UK Boys 1% / 13% / 50% / 31% / 5%; UK Girls 2% / 23% / 44% / 26% / 4%.
Much worse and Somewhat worse combined, which is the figure this card's title rests on and is the archive's own arithmetic rather than anything printed on the slide: 19% (US Total), 14% (US Boys), 21% (US Girls), 21% (UK Total), 14% (UK Boys), 25% (UK Girls).
"Q: In general, how has Instagram affected [the way you feel about yourself/your mental health]?
There were no statistically significant differences among those who answered for 'the way you feel about yourself' and those who answered for 'your mental health'
US n = 1296; UK n = 1308"
"Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rates of anxiety and depression among teens
• This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups
• Constant comparison on Instagram is 'the reason' why there are higher levels of anxiety and depression in young people
• Social comparison and perfectionism are nothing new, but young people are dealing with this on an unprecedented scale.
• The proliferation of new and different ways to compare themselves to others, combined with constant access to means that there is no way to escape social comparison on IG.
• For both boys and girls, this was called out as being the number one reason why IG is worse than other platforms for mental health. And, young people openly attribute their increased level of anxiety and depression to Instagram."
"'The reason why our generation is so messed up and has higher anxiety and depression than our parents is because we have to deal with social media. Everyone feels like they have to be perfect.' - UK Female"
"Teens who struggle with mental health say Instagram makes it worse
• Young people are acutely aware that Instagram can be bad for their mental health, yet are compelled to spend time on the app for fear of missing out on cultural and social trends.
• Teens specifically call out the following as ways that Instagram harms their mental health:
◦ pressure to conform to social stereotypes
◦ pressure to match the money and body shapes of influencers
◦ the need for validation -- views, likes, followers
◦ friendship conflicts, bullying, and hate speech
◦ over-sexualization of girls
◦ inappropriate advertisements targeted to vulnerable groups"
"Teens not satisfied with their lives are more likely to say IG makes them feel worse than those who are satisfied"
"Social comparison exacerbates problems teens are dealing with
• Although others' behaviors online can hurt, the self-scrutiny and anxiety associated with personal consumption patterns is more damaging to mental health.
• Young people know this, but they don't adopt different patterns.
• In some cases, they can get addicted to things that make them feel bad.
• In the long term, constant self-critique and scrutiny will permanently shape the way a person views themselves in relation to others."
"Social pressure, especially around body image, makes teens feel bad
• Feeling like you have to look a certain way, do certain things, or buy certain things to fit in leaves teens feeling bad about themselves."
"Social pressure leads to negative downstream effects
• Teens called out ad targeting on Instagram as feeding insecurities, especially around weight and body image."
"Teens talk about the amount of time they spend on Instagram as one of the 'worst' aspects of their relationship to the app. They have an addicts' narrative about their use -- it can make them feel good, feel bad. They wish they could spend less time caring about it, but they can't help themselves. Teens recognize the amount of time they spend online isn't good for them but at the same time know they lack the willpower to control the time spent themselves."
"Content about SSI makes teens feel the worst, followed by people feeling they aren't good enough"
[Content on IG makes teens feel very bad]:
[they wanted to hurt themselves]:
• US "76%"
• UK "53%"
[they wanted to kill themselves]:
• US "70%"
• UK "46%"
[they're not good enough]:
• US "48%"
• UK "32%"
"Q: How does seeing these posts or Stories affect you? Does it make you feel very bad, somewhat bad, neither bad nor good, somewhat good, or very good? n's vary"
Wendy Gross: "We recently wrapped research on teens' mental health - how they define it, how they talk about, how Instagram may affect it, and how we can help them. This research was conducted to inform outreach teams on how to build meaningful and impact campaigns and yielded suggestions for both product and outreach teams to support teens. # TL;DR: * Teens generally agree on the definition of mental health, what issues fall into the category of mental health, and the language to describe feeling unwell. * 82% of teens have felt at least one emotional issue in the past month. One in five has thought about suicide or self-injury. * Teens say Instagram has had a positive impact on their mental health, but those who are unsatisfied with their lives are more negatively affected by the app. * Harm on Instagram falls into three major categories: social comparison, social pressure, and negative interactions with other people. * Teens feel they have to cope alone, but they want help. * Product suggestions include personalized Explore and Feed, better time spent tools, and opting out of personally triggering ad categories. * Outreach suggestions include a page about feeling good about yourself, content to help teens talk about these issues, and parents education."
Kenzie Snyder: "Thanks Wendy! I'm curious whether anything came up in terms of time spent on the app influencing mental health? I'm kicking off a workstream around well-being and app dependency"
Wendy Gross: "Hi Kenzie! We actually heard a lot about this! In the focus groups teens told us that they don't like the amount of time they spend on the app but feel like they have to be present. They often feel 'addicted' and know that what they're seeing is bad for their mental health but feel unable to stop themselves. This makes them not feel like they get a break or can't switch off social media. In the survey, about 30% (and even larger proportions of those who are unsatisfied with their lives) said that the amount of time they spend on social media makes them feel worse. About half of teens in both markets want Instagram to encourage them to take a break or to get off the app (see slide 48). In other work (https://fb.workplace.com/groups/InstaInsights/permalink/2424618707586730/) we found that time spent is among one of the most negative experiences for IG (25%+ say they spend too much time on social media, and it's worst on Instagram and Facebook). At the same time, they didn't think there was anything they could do about it and had fairly negative things to say about the time spent tools we have (particularly that the tools are easy to ignore)"
Elisabeth Diana: "Karina - what can we do to address this more bluntly than just playing whack a mole? I'm worried about this
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/instagram-fuelling-mental-health-crisis-20551865"
[Unattributed]: "My understanding is product has a meeting later today to align on removing all face-distorting effects from the gallery while we wait for the PPF recommendation on beautification filters -- I would be strongly supportive of the pause on approving beautification effects into the Spark AR platform while that review is underway. We are in a very bad place attempting to defend this, especially for young teenage girls who are the primary audience of these filters, and I believe ████ is aligned as well. Because Spark AR is a centrally managed product platform but IG is its main 'client', ████ I defer to you on who needs to support that pause."
Karina Newton: "Sorry Monika and Nell, I thought you were off the hook but unfortunately not.
Given this is blowing up in the UK press right now on a particularly sensitive subject matter for IG (teenage girls and mental health), IG product and comms wants to be able to say we will 'suspend' any facial distortion beautification Spark AR/VR effects allowed by our current policy 'upon escalation' as we are undertaking our PPF review process. This means the 3rd party filters would be put back in a pending approval state in the Spark platform until the recommended policy changes are reviewed and passed by PPF next month. Given the small number of filters that would be escalated, the ops lift isn't big here and ops is reviewing what that would take now.
Given the scrutiny of these 3rd party filters so close to a time we are confident we are going to change the policy, I feel it's not unreasonable – I certainly don't think we can defend them. That said, it would be suspending an approved filter under current policy which is not a precedent I feel great about."
Shane Witnov: "2 issues that have recently come up discussions with Growth about age management that I'd really appreciate your quick help/take on. We owe a response back to Growth on Wednesday. (Sorry for short notice).
1. How long is reasonable to block a device after it failed our age gate? As you know you get 2 chances to enter a valid age and after that we block for 2 hours or until you force quit the app. In the past you expressed concern that you didn't think 2 hours was credible. I think we have the chance to increase that number as we roll out globally and standardize with IG. What do you think is the minimum credible number of hours? And if you had any thoughs on a way to validate this or have a more rigorous basis for this other than our best guest, I'd welcome that. If we wanted to read into legislative intent we could try to tie it to the average length that a web browser was left open in 1998 when COPPA as this is supposed to match session cookies, which expire when a browser is closed. For that I think 2 hours isn't unreasonable, but that likely isn't the best standard."
████: "Antigone,
I'm sure you've had to go 'round this debate a million times over. My two cents: I don't think any cool-down period is defensible and now that I've had some good visibility into the Core Dimensions work on reaching a 'Gold Standard' I'd rather go with Option 3: Push age launch to January in order to test and align on 'gold standard' before launching. They seem to be making good progress with their new Adult Classifier (an improvement upon Single Factor Approach currently used by FB Dating).
Re: using age range, I'm not sure how this is an improvement but agree that we can't go with option #1 where there's only one bucket below 13. So long as we have a cool-down period, we're signaling that we are OK with letting u13s on our platform.
On the other end of our age management workflow, I just learned that our age change and underage_account disable work (both of which I'm now plugged into) are very under-developed/broken:
1. There's no single owner for underage disables and work has just kicked off to launch an effort to cross-app checkpoint/disable.
2. When a user tries to update their age to be <13, we do not checkpoint them as underage and they are able to continue using FB even after they confirm that they are a specific age (see the screenshot I took below, 'I confirm my age is 9'). All I have to do is close the error dialog box and keep changing my birthdate until I get the right one. (We're getting CO to fix this right now)"
████: "can you see if we're logging who hits this error message ('You cannot select a birthdate that indicates you are under 13 years old')"
████: "Sample query of it shows that there's a little under 2k 'under 13' errors thrown every day"
████: "████ tldr: ~2k FB accounts per day are making a DOB change where they explicitly check a box confirming they are <13 before saving (but we don't lock them out/checkpoint them - just throw an error). This is a major COPPA risk for us to keep them active, as it constitutes explicit knowledge of U13.
Who should we work with on the growth side to understand the implications of changing the behavior (i.e., checkpointing ~2k users/day immediately)?"
"The heart tab can be overwhelming. It's like if you take off work for a week and you then have emails and they all require individual attention."
"I think on IG there can be an expectation to respond within X amount of time... [Choosing to disable push] was more for me personally, like things can wait. My number one thing is my mental health, I'm not going to constantly harm my mental health for the aim of someone else."
"Some people are being overloaded because they are inherently more susceptible to notification dependency"
"We know notifications has an harmful effect on teen usage. We'll spend H1 investigating further..."
"But, we make body image issues worse for 1 in 3 teen girls"
"More teen girls thought that IG made body image issues worse rather than better"
"Most wished Instagram had given them better control over what they saw (except SSI)"
"Social comparison has high reach, moderate intensity and we are making it worse for 1 in 4 people"
Body image & eating disordersSuicide & self-injuryAddiction & problematic use
"We ranked issues by each category (reach, intensity, IG impact and expectation), to generate a composite average rank such that lower average indicates that the issue should be higher on our list."
◦ "Based on composite ranked scores, social comparison ranked highest across all age cohorts"
◦ "SSI ranked second, followed by depression (sadness), body image, anxiety and loneliness"
◦ "FB Survey: In the 2017 FB survey, social comparison ranked well below SSI, loneliness, anxiety and body image issues"
◦ "Opportunity: Negative social comparison is a unique opportunity area for Instagram to tackle given its relatively higher reach, intensity and our assumed responsibility."
"Checkpointing U13 users on DOB change, -3.4M MAP/year hit if launched
Context
1. Right now, when users attempt to change their birthday in a logged-in state, we do not allow them to change it to under 13.
2. We need to checkpoint the people who attempt to change to under 13 with a photo ID challenge.
3. We currently have very aggressive placement for entry points to DOB changes.
4. We currently do not have any confirmation screen on mobile.
5. If we started checkpointing these users today, we would be locking users out of their account who selected the wrong year without any warning. We should make it less likely that users could do this by mistake before launching.
Data
1. 18k users/day attempt to change to a birthday under 13, 15k of which are on mobile
2. 7% of users who are enrolled clear the ID checkpoint
1. Need to understand whether this is due to completion of challenge, eligibility, review capacity, clear rate or something else
2. If we were to start checkpointing all of these users, it would be around a -3.4M MAP/year hit."
Margaret Stewart: "We are asking for your support to update our policies to:
1. Disallow effects that mimic plastic surgery for first party (FB/IG/MSGR) and third party effects.
2. Disallow default-on settings, including sticky settings, for camera effects and filters (to be discussed further, see next steps)"
"We're seeing a rise in popularity of beauty effects — both in creation and in use — which has reinvigorated the conversation on the stance that Facebook, Instagram, Oculus, etc. should take on how those filters relate to body image, mental health, and wellbeing. This is especially sensitive for its potential impact on our younger users, who are the biggest demographic using our Spark effects."
"Policy recommendation: Reject cosmetic effects that change the user's facial structure in a way that cannot be achieved by makeup and must be achieved by plastic surgery. This excludes fantastical effects that change a user's facial structure for the purpose of turning the user into a character or animal."
Andrew Bosworth: "Just FYI I mentioned this to Mark and he might want to review before implementing. He is concerned about whether we have good enough data that this represents real harm"
John Hegeman: "I'd also love to go deeper on our understanding of the harm and where we are relative to the broader market and cultural norms across the world. In general I worry that our approach to these policies is too US-centric and also doesn't put enough emphasis on giving people the power to represent themselves in the way that they would like."
"Plastic Surgery: I think a blanket ban on things that can't be done with make-up is going to limit our ability to be competitive in Asian markets (including India). I'd much rather see us develop a more nuanced framework for responsible use that still allows us to build the products that people clearly want and intentionally seek out."
Margaret Stewart: "Hi John, The team put together a one(-ish) pager on the academic research and external engagement that was conducted before forming the policy recommendation. I think it outlines some compelling motivations for formalizing these policies.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JYY60GeffqAAg_ZkQ61GcAHXsfIBDr2koliFZPT1v_w/edit#"
"These restrictions on plastic surgery effects have been informally in place for a long time so I am a bit surprised to hear the push back. When we last talked, all teams were in support of these guidelines. Is there something specific about the wording that causes concern? Or do you feel these are different than what we discussed in the past?"
Andrew Bosworth: "Margaret – to your question about what changed, I can't speak for others but I may have initially misunderstood the scope we aspired to here with this policy. I agree filters that encourage plastic surgery (as the one on IG recently) are too far but as written below I worry we are taking too aggressive a stance... I worry if we are too severe in denying users something for which they have demand then all we will do in practice is move them into other apps which aren't likely to be as restrained... I also share the concern others have raised about the cultural lens of the research as it does seem to be applying a western standard across cultures, though I haven't read every study in depth so this may just be a misreading on my part."
Karina Newton: "[It]'s been our strong recommendation from comms, marketing, policy, and engagement with nearly 20 outside experts and academics that we pass this policy which codifies a more refined and pressure tested version of our temporary policy (the one we made after the uproar last month) which disallows effects that mimic plastic surgery."
"As you know, these Spark filters primarily live on IG right now and are overwhelmingly used by teen girls. Some of the arguments below seem to be rooted in 'not giving people what they want/being paternalistic' views but think it undermines the seriousness of the subject -- we're talking about actively encouraging young girls into body dysmorphia and enabling self-view of an idealized face (and very western definition of that face by the way) that can result in serious issues. It's also unrealistic to expect a large body of academic research on these subjects given the newness of the technology but the outside academics and experts consulted were nearly unanimous on the harm here."
████: "I personally fall on the side of being more principled and disallowing any type of effects that cannot be achieved with makeup. I think this is especially challenging for us because whatever decision we make here will impact IG first given (a) the dominance of camera usage vs the rest of the family and (b) our position of strength with young people."
████: "Agree with all of this. I'm all for option value, but the argument that this decision might move people into other apps doesn't carry weight with me If it means we're not setting a good example/being a good steward for young people."
Adam Mosseri: "I agree with John actually, but would probably frame things differently as I think his not isn't quite earning him credibility with Margaret and crew... I'd be happy to support effects that mimic plastic surgery, but all effects you can't do without makeup ends up disallowing gender swap, old version of yourself, baby face, non-animal monster looking self for hallloween making you look like someone else, etc, which doesn't seem right."
████: "I'm pretty sure that a lot of that is still allowed... it's more about not allowing effects associated with plastic surgery."
Karina Newton: "Given that we are the biggest platform for these, I would argue our decision here will actually put pressure on other platforms in positive ways. But more fundamentally, of all the myriad of ways we are being accused of being bad for young people, I don't know why we wouldn't take this opportunity to lead on well-being. Instagram is intrinsically a huge target (social comparison, image based platform/body image issues, branded content, rising teen anxiety, tech addiction, etc) this is an easy win and place to draw strength from as we defend what's core to our product and value to people."
Adam Mosseri: "I hear you, it's pretty clear where you stand on this. For what it's worth I'm more focused on the effects than the stakeholders, but appreciate that both are important."
"In a survey with over 22000 Instagram users across United States, India, Japan, Indonesia, Brazil and Turkey, we found that at least 1 in 2 users had experienced at least one mental health related issue in the last 30 days... We found that social comparison, SSI, loneliness and problematic social media use especially stand out above other issues when looking at the reach and intensity of issue, expectation of support from Instagram for them and the extent to which we make them worse."
"71% of teens in US use Instagram, the second highest use social network, preceded only by Snapchat. However, IG is perceived as worse for mental health compared to other social media sites like Snap, Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. According to a survey of 1500 young adults, Instagram was ranked as the worst social media app (compared to Snap, Twitter, Facebook and Youtube) for mental health and well being, particularly for its impacts on anxiety and depression."
"Younger users on Instagram (age 24 and below) also demonstrate lower well-being than older users. More specifically they demonstrate greater depression, loneliness and negative affect."
"Additionally, exposure to non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) content may increase risks in engaging in these behaviors and consuming NSSI content online can trigger offline NSSI behaviors. Instagram is particularly susceptible to this as it allows for use of anonymous identities and hashtags and is a visual medium."
"Commonly agreed on facets of problematic use include perceived lack of control over the time spent on Facebook; negative feelings about own Facebook usage (e.g., guilt, regret, shame); and negative life impact for: relationships, sleep, & productivity/work."
"Under the extended measurement framework, problematic use appears to affect 12.5% of people. Another 11% of people report negative life impact 'very often' but only 'sometimes' lacking control."
"Problematic use may cause issues for our users and this should be our primary business reason to address it."
"20 percent of participants who suffer from problematic use consider deactivation or deletion due to negative life impact of Facebook very often as opposed to less than 5 percent of those who do not suffer from problematic use:"
Sources include internal documents, public filings and press reports. “Alleged by plaintiffs” denotes the plaintiffs’ characterization, not Meta’s own words. Source labels identify provenance, not a finding of fact.
Meta & Children's Online Safety