For a few months, the Wall Street Journal has been targeting Facebook and its satellites. The prestigious newspaper has started a series called “Facebook Files” with which it aims to publish confidential documents – and inviting those who have others to participate also anonymously. What emerges every time is not flattering for Facebook which is in obvious difficulty. According to some, this is the most difficult moment since Cambridge Analytica even if objectively this time there is less hype. Wanting to see it from a personal point of view, it could be said that Rupert Murdoch, who among other things is the owner of the WSJ, has decided to go to war on Mark Zuckerberg. But such a reading does not honor the quality of the Wall Street Journal’s journalism which, whatever the wishes of its publisher, is dealing with issues that concern us all and about which it makes sense to know more than we know.
The last lunge concerns an internal document which talks about the harmful effects of Instagram on adolescents from a psychological point of view. The reactions were so alarmed that Instagram number one Adam Mosseri announced the postponement of a program called “Instagram for Kids” which was supposed to allow kids – between 10 and 12 years old – to have accounts controlled by their parents and with selected contents. According to the opponents of the world of Zuckerberg it would be just a way to secure another lucrative market. But I disagree. Meanwhile, the “kids” accounts would have been excluded from advertising. And then this mode already exists for YouTube (from 2015) and for TikTok (from 2020); while Apple and Google allow you to create profiles linked to those of parents and supervised in terms of duration and content. They are not infallible tools, but they do something, I say it from direct experience.
The objection is that today a pre-adolescent boy with a smartphone in his hand is easily able to open other parallel profiles without his parents noticing. After all, today the only check that social networks can do is this: when one registers, they ask him how old he is, he responds by putting a date from 14 years upwards and everything is fine. TikTok claims to do further checks using artificial intelligence tools but they still have to be very rudimentary because getting around them is pretty easy.
What to do? The ideal – and simpler – solution would be not to give a smartphone before the age of 14. But this, for a number of reasons, does not happen. It is enough to go out of middle school to realize this. Moreover, the 14-year limit is very generic, because there is everything on the web and even at 14, some gradual access to content makes sense. And equally, one account is 13 years and another 10 and 11. In short, it is a complicated and delicate problem whose failure to solve directly affects our children, conditioning their growth in undesirable or desirable ways.
This long introduction serves to introduce what could be the perfect solution. He proposed it on Twitter Alex Stamos, former head of security at Facebook, now head of the Stanford Internet Observatory. The solution is to move the problem from social networks and platforms to smartphones and personal computers by requiring those who produce them to provide a system with which the age of the minor is recorded at the time of purchase and provided anonymously, via API, to each application; and at the same time require the app that has content for under 18 to publish a plan with which they explain how they intend to filter them based on age.
Simple? No. But, Protocol notes, “the most shocking thing about this proposal is that it hasn’t already sparked a global conversation about how to keep kids safe on social media.”
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