Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, social networks regularly accused of harming the mental health of younger users, has ordered an end to ads that target teens based on their gender.
Starting in February, companies that intend to advertise to minors on these platforms will only have access to their age and location, to ensure that the content of the ads is appropriate and useful, Meta explained on Tuesday, in a statement posted on its site. website on the Internet. .
The company led by Mark Zuckerberg, which has already stopped allowing advertisers, since the summer of 2021, to know the history of adolescents on other sites, has also decided to extend this limitation to its own platforms.
This ruling amounts to “removing the ability of advertisers to target teens based on their interests and activities,” Meta explained.
The group also plans to make it easier for those under 18 to indicate when they want to receive fewer ads on certain topics, such as the genre of a TV series or a specific sport.
The US authorities and child protection associations criticize applications that are particularly popular among young people, such as Instagram, but also Snapchat, YouTube or TikTok, for having harmful effects on their youngest users.
The allegations took on a new dimension when, in the fall of 2021, former Facebook employee Frances Haugen released internal documents showing that the platform’s leaders were aware of certain risks to minors.
Since then, companies have sought to provide guarantees on the protection of adolescents.
For many, these efforts are insufficient and officials from the Seattle public schools, in the US state of Washington, filed a complaint on Friday against several social networks, accusing them of “attacks” on the mental health of minors.
“The increase in suicides, suicide attempts and mental health-related emergency visits is no coincidence. (…) This crisis was already worsening before the pandemic and research has indicated that social networks play an important role in the emergence of mental health problems in young people,” denounced the complainants.
Source: TSF
