Instagram, Other Social-Media Apps Need Stricter Regulation, Senators Say

“I’m proud of our work to help keep young people safe, to support young people who are struggling, and to empower parents with tools to help their teenagers develop healthy and safe online habits,” said Mr. Mosseri, whose parent company Meta also owns Facebook.

Members of the Senate subcommittee on consumer protection painted a far different picture, citing internal documents disclosed by The Wall Street Journal showing that Instagram makes body-image issues worse for a substantial minority of teen girls and is blamed by teens for increases in anxiety and depression.

Several senators pointed to Instagram accounts their own offices had created that repeatedly appeared to push teenage girls toward harmful content.

“I am just a little bit frustrated,” said Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.), the panel’s top Republican. Parents “continue to hear from you that change is coming, that things are going to be different…. Guess what? Nothing changes. Nothing.”

Mr. Mosseri pushed back against some lawmakers’ assertion that the company’s social-media products are addictive, saying he doesn’t believe research shows that. “We do have the same goal. We all want teens to be safe online,” he said.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) shot back: “I think we are in diametrically opposed goals, the goals of parents out there and the goals of your company.”

“Our kids aren’t cash cows,” she added. “When you look at what your company has done, it’s to try and get more and more of them on board.”

The testy exchanges came as lawmakers work on legislation creating new legal obligations for social-media companies to prevent online harms and open their apps’ inner workings to outside scrutiny.

Mr. Mosseri made his own suggestion for regulation, calling for establishing a new industry panel to set safety standards for social-media platforms to help protect younger children from harm across the internet.

Among its responsibilities, the panel would set standards for all companies in critical areas such as how to verify user age, Mr. Mosseri said. It would also establish best practices on how to design age-appropriate experiences, and how to add more parental controls.

He said the body’s decisions should be reviewed by policy makers, and there should be enforcement against companies that don’t follow the standards. Companies that didn’t abide by the standards would lose the sweeping legal protections that federal law currently provides for online platforms, he said.

“The reality is that keeping people safe is not just about any one company,” Mr. Mosseri said.

Senators said tougher measures are needed. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.), who chairs the consumer protection subcommittee, said he is working with Ms. Blackburn on new legislation to require more transparency into social-media algorithms and data sets.

“The time for self-policing and self-regulation is over,” Mr. Blumenthal said.

Mr. Blumenthal and Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) both pushed Mr. Mosseri to release the internal research cited by the Journal in its Facebook Files series. Mr. Mosseri said he couldn’t commit to doing so because of privacy concerns that might need to be addressed, and said some of the information might have been destroyed under the company’s data-retention policy.

Several senators said they had tested Instagram’s content recommendation algorithms, and were dismayed by what they saw.

Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah) said his office created a fake account for a 13-year-old girl and followed the first user the app suggested, a female celebrity.

“It changed and it went dark fast,” Mr. Lee said, displaying content “that promotes body dysmorphia, sexualization of women.”

“The thing that gets me is, what changed was following this female celebrity account,” which Instagram itself recommended, he said.

Mr. Mosseri said specific examples don’t necessarily reflect broad user experiences. “We absolutely do not want any content that promotes eating disorders on our platform. We do our best to remove it.”

Before the hearing, Instagram said it would implement new tools to protect teens who use the app. They include prompts to suggest users take breaks, controls for parents to curtail their children’s usage, limits on tagging or mentioning teen users, and the ability for users to bulk-delete their own photos, videos and other content.

Those measures, however, might not go far enough to satisfy lawmakers. Ms. Blackburn said the new Instagram tools were an attempt to shift attention from their mistakes.

“This is a case of too little too late because now there is bipartisan momentum here and in the House to tackle these problems we are seeing in Big Tech,” Ms. Blackburn said at the hearing.

Some lawmakers, including Ms. Blackburn, want Instagram to abandon plans to roll out a version tailored to children, similar to YouTube Kids and other products. Mr. Mosseri announced a pause on those plans in September, but said he still believed in the idea as a way to protect preteens who today might use the app despite its minimum required age of 13.

He maintained that position Wednesday. “What I can commit to today is that no child between the ages of 10 and 12, should we ever manage to build Instagram for 10- to 12-years-olds, will have access to that without their explicit parental consent,” he said.

So far, senators’ legislative talks haven’t yielded proposals with broad consensus.

Mr. Blumenthal said Meta and other companies should be required to open their platforms to independent researchers who can study how content recommendation algorithms are working.

Mr. Mosseri said he thought researchers should have “regular access to meaningful data about social-media usage across the entire industry.”

Sen. John Thune (R., S.D.) said users should know more about how those algorithms work, and be able to opt out of them. “Do you believe consumers should be able to use Instagram without being manipulated by algorithms that are designed to keep them hooked?” he asked.

“I believe it’s important that people have control over their experience,” Mr. Mosseri responded. He said the company is hoping next year to release a feature of Instagram that displays content chronologically.

Wednesday’s hearing of the consumer-protection subcommittee is the latest in a series started in September after the Journal published the Facebook Files.

Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned whistleblower, appeared before the panel Oct. 5. The company has disputed her characterization of its culture and decision making, saying it works hard to keep consumers safe and many users benefit from its apps.

The panel has also questioned executives from ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok, Snap Inc.’s Snapchat and Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube about children’s safety online.

Write to Ryan Tracy at [email protected] and John D. McKinnon at [email protected]