Child-welfare organisations send open letter to Mark Zuckerberg urging him to make Facebook safer for children
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A global group of more than 50 child-safety organisations and campaigners has urged Mark Zuckerberg to make Facebook safer for children, by sending an open letter to the social-network founder and calling for transparency on how the platform plans to tackle the issue.
Led by the NSPCC, the group has asked Facebook to publish, in full, its research on how its apps impact children's mental health and to grant access to its data to independent researchers and publish risk assessments of its products.
The group says it is speaking out in the wake of whistleblower Frances Haugen's claim that Facebook's products "harm children" and the accusation that it refused to change its products — despite having internal research that showed they can have a negative impact on younger users — because executives elevate profits over safety.
Ms Haugen's accusations were accompanied by tens of thousands of pages of internal research documents she secretly copied, before leaving her job in Facebook's civic integrity unit.
Facebook has dismissed the attacks as a "misrepresentation".
The Canadian Centre for Child Protection, the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, the Child Rescue Coalition, the International Justice Mission, 5 Rights, Barnardo's, and the Internet Watch Foundation have voiced their concerns about the company's approach to child safety.
The coalition has presented five recommendations to the tech giant for it to "regain the trust of parents and child-protection professionals" and ensure the company "contributes to, rather than compromises", children's safety and wellbeing.
The group said it welcomes Facebook's efforts to undertake research on the mental-health impact of its products, but is recommending that its work be published in full and that access to it be granted to independent regulators and experts.
The letter also calls for Facebook to do the same for any research it has on its products and their impact on the spread of child sexual abuse; to publish Facebook risk assessments into its products; share more details on how it is conducting reputational reviews for different services; and to review the child-safety implications of its planned move to end-to-end encryption across its services.