Mark Zuckerberg testifies remotely on March 25, 2021
Credit: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg
Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has revealed that he lets his five-year-old daughter use the company’s Messenger Kids app.
Testifying before the US Congress, the 36-year-old founder said that he does not believe Facebook’s products are harmful to children and defended its plan to launch a new version of Instagram for under-13s.
He also said that he frequently watches educational videos on YouTube Kids with his two daughters, aged three and five, but dodged a question about whether he had concerns about unsupervised smartphone use.
The exchanges were part of a marathon five and a half hour hearing before the House of Representatives’ commerce committee, which interrogated Mr Zuckerberg and his counterparts at Google and Twitter about their roles in the storming of the US Capitol in January and their record on child safety.
Mr Zuckerberg said: "My daughters are five and three, and they don’t use our products. Actually, that’s not exactly true – my eldest daughter Max, I let her use Messenger Kids sometimes to message her cousins."
He gave few details about Facebook plans, revealed last week by BuzzFeed News, for a junior version of Instagram, which would officially expand its audience to children under 13 (who already sometimes use it by lying about their age).
"We’re early in thinking through how this service would work," said Mr Zuckerberg. "There is clearly a large number of people under the age of 13 who would want to use a service like Instagram; we currently do not allow them to do that…
"I think helping people stay connected with friends and learn about different content online is broadly positive. There are clearly issues that need to be thought through and worked out, including how parents can control the experience of kids."
A younger Zuckerberg with his wife Priscilla Chan and their newborn daughter Max
Credit: Getty/AFP
He pitched the new app as a potential solution to the problem of under-age users, saying: "If we create a safe system, [with] appropriate parent controls, we might be able to get people into using that instead."
However, he struggled to respond to accusations that Facebook does not do enough to catch under-age users as it stands and questions about how much money the company makes from adverts shown to them.
Asked by Florida Democrat Kathy Castor if he was sure there were no under-13s on Instagram, he said only that they are not allowed. Ms Castor shot back: "Of course every parent knows that there are kids under 13 on Instagram! And the problem is that you know it."
An investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches programme in 2018 found that Facebook’s moderators did not take action against suspected under-13s unless they admitted their real age, with one worker saying: "We just pretend that we are blind and we don’t know what under-age looks like."
Messenger Kids, which has a minimum age of four years old, remains unreleased in the UK and the EU due to an ongoing impasse with the Irish Data Protection Commission about whether and how it can comply with EU data laws.
Some committee members accused the tech bosses of seeking to monetise children’s attention and asked in detail about their features and business models. Bill Johnson, a Republican representing Ohio, said they were "essentially handing our children a lit cigarette and hoping they stay addicted for life".
Republicans largely abandoned their traditional questions about anti-conservative bias and free speech, focusing instead on child protection and young people’s mental health.
Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google and its subsidiary YouTube, admitted that YouTube Kids automatically plays a new video after the last has finished, a feature that has been criticised for aiding addictive behaviour and leading viewers towards extremist beliefs.
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