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Snapchat and Other Social Media Platforms Offer Parental Control Features, but Do They Offer Enough Safety?
As concerns about social media’s harmful effects on teens continue to rise, platforms from Snapchat to TikTok to Instagram are bolting on new features they say will make their services safer and more age appropriate. But the changes rarely address the elephant in the the room — the algorithms pushing endless content that can drag anyone, not just teens, into harmful rabbit holes.
The tools do offer some help, such as blocking strangers from messaging kids. But they also share some deeper flaws, starting with the fact that teenagers can get around limits if they lie about their age. The platforms also place the burden of enforcement on parents. And they do little or nothing to screen for inappropriate and harmful material served up by algorithms that can affect teens’ mental and physical well-being.
“These platforms know that their algorithms can sometimes be amplifying harmful content, and they’re not taking steps to stop that,” said Irene Ly, privacy counsel at the nonprofit Common Sense Media. The more teens keep scrolling, the more engaged they get — and the more engaged they are, the more profitable they are to the platforms, she said. “I don’t think they have too much incentive to be changing that.”
Take, for instance, Snapchat, which on Tuesday introduced new parental controls in what it calls the “Family Center” — a tool that lets parents see who their teens are messaging, though not the content of the messages themselves. One catch: both parents and their children have to opt into to the service.
Nona Farahnik Yadegar, Snap’s director of platform policy and social impact, likens it to parents wanting to know who their kids are going out with.
If kids are headed out to a friend’s house or are meeting up at the mall, she said, parents will typically ask, “Hey, who are you going to meet up with? How do you know them?” The new tool, she said, aims to give parents ”the insight they really want to have in order to have these conversations with their teen while preserving teen privacy and autonomy.”
These conversations, experts agree, are important. In an ideal world, parents would regularly sit down with their kids and have honest talks about social media and the dangers and pitfalls of the online world.
But many kids use a bewildering variety of platforms, all of which are constantly evolving — and that stacks the odds against parents expected to master and monitor the controls on multiple platforms, said Josh Golin, executive director of children’s digital advocacy group Fairplay.
“Far better to require platforms to make their platforms safer by design and default instead of increasing the workload on already overburdened parents,” he said.
The new controls, Golin said, also fail to address a myriad of existing problems with Snapchat. These range from kids misrepresenting their ages to “compulsive use” encouraged by the app’s Snapstreak feature to cyberbullying made easier by the disappearing messages that still serve as Snapchat’s claim to fame.
Farahnik Yadegar said Snapchat has “strong measures” to deter kids from falsely claiming to be over 13. Those caught lying about their age have their account immediately deleted, she said. Teens who are over 13 but pretend to be even older get one chance to correct their age.
Detecting such lies isn’t foolproof, but the platforms have several ways to get at the truth. For instance, if a user’s friends are mostly in their early teens, it’s likely that the user is also a teenager, even if they said they were born in 1968 when they signed up. Companies use artificial intelligence to look for age mismatches. A person’s interests might also reveal their real age. And, Farahnik Yadegar pointed out, parents might also find out their kids were fibbing about their birth date if they try to turn on parental controls but find their teens ineligible.
Child safety and teen mental health are front and centre in both Democratic and Republicans critiques of tech companies. States, which have been much more aggressive about regulating technology companies than the federal government, are also turning their attention to the matter. In March, several state attorneys general launched a nationwide investigation into TikTok and its possible harmful effects on young users’ mental health.
TikTok is the most popular social app US teenagers use, according to a new report out Wednesday from the Pew Research Center, which found that 67 percent say they use the Chinese-owned video sharing platform. The company has said that it focuses on age-appropriate experiences, noting that some features, such as direct messaging, are not available to younger users. It says features such as a screen-time management tool help young people and parents moderate how long children spend on the app and what they see. But critics note such controls are leaky at best.
“It’s really easy for kids to try to get past these features and just go off on their own,” said Ly of Common Sense Media.
Instagram, which is owned by Facebook parent Meta, is the second most popular app with teens, Pew found, with 62 percent saying they use it, followed by Snapchat with 59 percent. Not surprisingly, only 32 percent of teens reported ever having used Facebook, down from 71 percent in 2014 and 2015, according to the report.
Last fall, former Facebook employee-turned whistleblower Frances Haugen exposed internal research from the company concluding that the social network’s attention-seeking algorithms contributed to mental health and emotional problems among Instagram-using teens, especially girls. That revelation led to some changes; Meta, for instance, scrapped plans for an Instagram version aimed at kids under 13. The company has also introduced new parental control and teen well-being features, such as nudging teens to take a break if they scroll for too long.
Such solutions, Ly said, are “sort of getting at the problem, but basically going around it and not getting to the root cause of it.”
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Meta Proposes Monthly Fee of Up to EUR 13 for Ad-Free Access to Instagram and Facebook: Report
According to a report, Instagram and Facebook could soon be available in some countries without any ads as part of the company’s efforts to comply with privacy regulations. Parent company Meta has reportedly pitched regulators the possibility of offering users the ability to pay a monthly fee instead of viewing personalised ads based on their information. Meta does not currently charge users for access to the company’s core services in any region, but privacy-related regulation is set to impact the company’s revenue that relies on showing its users personalised advertisements.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Meta has proposed charging users in the European Union up to EUR 13 (roughly Rs. 1,130) a month for access to an ad-free version of Facebook or Instagram on mobile — the price for users who sign up via the web browser would be EUR 10 (roughly Rs. 870) as the company wouldn’t need to pay Apple or Google the in-app purchase commission. Users would need to pay another EUR 6 (roughly Rs. 520) for each additional account.
The “subscription no ads” plan — or SNA — will be offered to European users, the company said in discussions with privacy watchdogs in Belgium and Ireland last month, according to the report. However, users in the US and other regions are unlikely to gain access to the ad-free plan in the near future.
Meta’s core services are currently available for free to all users on the platform, and the firm’s photo and video sharing, chat, and social networking services are supported by targeted advertisements that are based on user’s personal information. However, a recently passed regulation in the EU will require Facebook and Instagram to offer users the ability to opt out of the company using their personal information to target them with advertisements.
Last month, it was reported that Meta was mulling paid versions of Instagram and Facebook aimed at EU users, while users who did not pay for a subscription would continue to see ads on the service. The social media giant has already been fined in some regions — including Norway — for failing to comply with privacy regulations and using personal information to show users targeted advertisements.
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Meta Platforms used public Facebook and Instagram posts to train parts of its new Meta AI virtual assistant, but excluded private posts shared only with family and friends in an effort to respect consumers’ privacy, the company’s top policy executive told Reuters in an interview.
Meta also did not use private chats on its messaging services as training data for the model and took steps to filter private details from public datasets used for training, said Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, speaking on the sidelines of the company’s annual Connect conference this week.
“We’ve tried to exclude datasets that have a heavy preponderance of personal information,” Clegg said, adding that the “vast majority” of the data used by Meta for training was publicly available.
He cited LinkedIn as an example of a website whose content Meta deliberately chose not to use because of privacy concerns.
Clegg’s comments come as tech companies including Meta, OpenAI and Alphabet’s Google have been criticized for using information scraped from the internet without permission to train their AI models, which ingest massive amounts of data in order to summarize information and generate imagery.
The companies are weighing how to handle the private or copyrighted materials vacuumed up in that process that their AI systems may reproduce, while facing lawsuits from authors accusing them of infringing copyrights.
Meta AI was the most significant product among the company’s first consumer-facing AI tools unveiled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday at Meta’s annual products conference, Connect. This year’s event was dominated by talk of artificial intelligence, unlike past conferences which focused on augmented and virtual reality.
Meta made the assistant using a custom model based on the powerful Llama 2 large language model that the company released for public commercial use in July, as well as a new model called Emu that generates images in response to text prompts, it said.
The product will be able to generate text, audio and imagery and will have access to real-time information via a partnership with Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
The public Facebook and Instagram posts that were used to train Meta AI included both text and photos, Clegg said.
Those posts were used to train Emu for the image generation elements of the product, while the chat functions were based on Llama 2 with some publicly available and annotated datasets added, a Meta spokesperson told Reuters.
Interactions with Meta AI may also be used to improve the features going forward, the spokesperson said.
Clegg said Meta imposed safety restrictions on what content the Meta AI tool could generate, like a ban on the creation of photo-realistic images of public figures.
On copyrighted materials, Clegg said he was expecting a “fair amount of litigation” over the matter of “whether creative content is covered or not by existing fair use doctrine,” which permits the limited use of protected works for purposes such as commentary, research and parody.
“We think it is, but I strongly suspect that’s going to play out in litigation,” Clegg said.
Some companies with image-generation tools facilitate the reproduction of iconic characters like Mickey Mouse, while others have paid for the materials or deliberately avoided including them in training data.
OpenAI, for instance, signed a six-year deal with content provider Shutterstock this summer to use the company’s image, video and music libraries for training.
Asked whether Meta had taken any such steps to avoid the reproduction of copyrighted imagery, a Meta spokesperson pointed to new terms of service barring users from generating content that violates privacy and intellectual property rights.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
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WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger to Get AI Assistants; Meta Shows Off Image Generation Tool Emu
Meta showcased a host of new products and services, including the Meta Quest 3 mixed reality headset and a pair of smart glasses made in collaboration with Ray-Ban, at its Meta Connect annual conference on Wednesday. Alongside the hardware, the company also announced its own AI assistant, Meta AI, and a variety of AI experiences across Meta’s suite of apps and devices, including AI stickers in Meta apps and AI editing tools for Instagram. Meta AI, a conversational generative AI assistant much like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Bing, will be available on WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram.
Meta AI will be powered by the company’s custom model that borrows from Meta’s large language model, Llama 2. The AI assistant, Meta said, will provide real-time information in response to text-based queries, trawling the internet via Bing search. Meta AI will also generate images based on text prompts. The AI assistant can help plan hiking trips with your friends in a group chat, prepare recipes, or help with your shopping list. Users can type in “@MetaAI /imagine” inside their chat box and follow it up with descriptive text prompts for what they want the AI assistant to do. Meta AI is also coming to the company’s latest devices, the Meta Quest 3 and the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
In addition to its default AI assistant, the company also showed off AI avatars with distinct personalities. Meta is bringing 28 AI characters, each with a unique backstory and behaviour. These AI characters can be conversed with in WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger, and will also include some public figures and influencers that Meta has partnered up with for their likenesses. Famous people coming as AI characters include Dwayne Wade, Kendall Jenner, Mr. Beast, Snoop Dogg and more.
Emu can generate stickers based on user prompts
Photo Credit: Meta
Meta is calling its image generation tool ‘expressive media universe’, or Emu. The tool can also quickly generate AI stickers based on a user’s text prompts inside apps like WhatsApp or Instagram to share with friends. “It’s high-quality, photorealistic,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the presentation. “But, one of the coolest things is the Emu generates that fast. It’s not a minute. It takes five seconds to generate one of these,” he added. This custom sticker generation feature will roll out to select English-language users over the next month in WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and Facebook Stories.
The Facebook parent is also bringing new AI-powered image editing tools, specifically two new features — Restyle and Backdrop — that utilise technology from the Emu tool. Restyle acts as a kind of custom filter that works based on user prompts. Based on single descriptor or a more detail prompt, Restyle will edit your images to reflect a particular mood. And as the name suggests, Backdrop will let users change the background of their images based on custom prompts. Images created using both tools will carry markers that indicate the image is AI-generated. Meta said that Restyle and Backdrop were coming soon to Instagram but did not provide a concrete release date for the same.
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