Rep. Lori Trahan responds to WSJ report on Instagram and teen mental health

Today, I spoke with Representative Lori Trahan, the Congresswoman for the third district in Massachussetts, to get her reaction to a disturbing report in the Wall Street Journal about internal research at Instagram related to mental health impacts of that social media service, particularly on teens.

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal published its headline, “Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show.”The Journal’s Georgia Wells, Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharamanwrote that the Instagram documents they obtained were part of a "trove of internal communications provided to them on areas including teen mental health, political discourse and human trafficking."

• “Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” said a March 2020 slide presentation.
• “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said a slide from 2019.
• And, the Journal says that one presentation showed that "among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram."

Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri went on the Recode podcast with Peter Kafka to try to put more context around the WSJ report. I’d encourage folks to give that podcast a listen for more details on the company’s response.

I caught up with Representative Trahan earlier this afternoon. She put the Wall Street Journal’s report into the context of questions she asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a March 2021 hearing in the House Energy & Commerce Committee, and talked about what Congress might do next to hold the company accountable.

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Justin Hendrix:

Thank you so much for joining me, Congresswoman. You had a chance earlier this year to question Mark Zuckerberg directly about some of the same topics that were covered in this Wall Street Journal exclusive this week. And you addressed him at one point, obviously, as a member of Congress and then at one point you addressed him as a mother. Were you surprised by this new reporting?

Rep. Lori Trahan:

Honestly, I was not surprised by this new reporting. Certainly when Mr. Zuckerberg testified before us in March, he told Congress that the research he's seen on social media apps shows that platforms can have a positive mental health benefit. But I think we all know that's a hollow talking point. We knew it when he said it. And certainly the company's internal research shows that he knew- or at least he should have known- that it's the exact opposite, which is exactly what prompted the letter yesterday that my colleagues and I sent demanding what he knew and when he knew it, and also demanding the release of the full body of internal research that Facebook has done on the platform's impact on the mental health of young users.

Justin Hendrix:

So I understand that the whistleblower that provided what appears to be a large trove of information to the Wall Street Journal also provided some of that information to Congress. Are you- or is your committee- looking through that information as well?

Rep. Lori Trahan:

So I've seen what's been made public. I have not seen what's been handed over to Congress as of yet, but I certainly do look forward. I think you raise an important point, I think because what's especially alarming is that we wouldn't have known any of this if it weren't for courageous employees at Facebook who knew what was going on, knew it was wrong and decided to blow the whistle. And I think the fact that the alarm has been sounding inside of the company for years but leaders at the highest levels have done nothing is really a damning indictment of Facebook's priorities, namely putting profits over people. So I do look forward to it. And, frankly, I look forward to next steps. I look forward to hearing the response from Facebook to the letter that we sent and look forward to, if that response is insufficient, to bringing Mr. Zuckerberg back to Congress to testify about this.

Justin Hendrix:

Can you walk us through just a few of the specific questions that you have for Mark Zuckerberg in this letter that was sent alongside Senator Edward Markey and your colleague, Rep. Kathy Castor?

Rep. Lori Trahan:

Well, I think what's the most important about the letter that we sent to Mr. Zuckerberg yesterday is we want to know what he knew about this research and when he knew it. We demand the release of the full body of internal research that Facebook has done on the platform's impacts on the mental health of our young users. But we also we call on him once again to abandon his plans to create a new version of Instagram, specifically for our children. One of the things that we raised back in March was this concern that they're embarking on releasing an "Instagram for Kids."

Now, I'm the mom of two young girls. They're seven and 11. And like a lot of parents in my district and certainly across the country, we have serious concerns about how social media is going to impact them. It is always going to infiltrate my line of questioning and especially in light of this report and it's appalling results. So we see that in times it can be fatal if we don't get to the heart of this. And so I do think- and I firmly believe- it's just so clear to me that the last thing right now that Facebook should be doing is developing additional services that are engineered specifically for our younger children when they should be focused on making sure that their services are safe for the tens of millions of young users that are already using them.

Justin Hendrix:

I was going to ask you if this topic resonated with your constituents and whether you'd heard from them this week about this particular report.

Rep. Lori Trahan:

Absolutely. I'm certainly a member of Congress and I bring a lot of my lived experience to my job on the Consumer Protection Subcommittee. But first and foremost I'm a mom. I drop my girls off at the bus stop or at school and I talk to other moms in my community. And I think that we all sort of concur that creating an Instagram for kids, it was a terrible idea before this report came out. It's certainly an even worse one now. And I think in March when we talked to Mr. Zuckerberg, when we questioned him about his plans, he couldn't give us details about what this service would look like six months ago. Now, we know that there are specific features on Instagram today that would be so harmful to rolling out for our youngest children.

I mean, think of the filters that our young daughters would be using to make their appearance sort of glow or make it more perfect. It signals to them that their real appearance isn't good enough. Or going back onto the app relentlessly to see the comments or the number of likes. I mean, this is not surprising that it has these ill effects on our young people. And I think that we're seeing that on the main platform. But I think about our youngest children and the fact that this is their growth opportunity, right? This is their next frontier of growth. Targeting our children and putting those profits above their mental health, which we now know, the whole world knows is going to be harmful. And in some cases fatal.

And so I do think that resonates with moms. That resonates with moms who try to use those parental controls or stand over their children so they're not getting onto the wrong app or using those features that they know would be harmful. So I think the one thing that we want our platforms to do is be responsible about age appropriate design, about looking at this from the lens of how are we going to design features so that our children's best interests are at heart? So this is something that I talk about a lot as a legislator, I talk about a lot as a mom.

Justin Hendrix:

So you reference in your statement on the Wall Street Journal report this week, a particular piece of legislation that you are advancing, the Social Media DATA Act. Can you tell folks a little bit about what that act does and why it is relevant in this context?

Rep. Lori Trahan:

So I think Facebook has been notorious for cherry picking their internal research and releasing it so it casts them in a very bright light, right? They do that before Congress, they do that to regulators. And most importantly, they do it to their users. And they've completely lost their credibility in this regard. If Facebook and other large platforms had better programs in place to collaborate with academic researchers, we could have had public facing peer reviewed studies for everyone to see. So one of the things that we did was we introduced legislation earlier this year that achieves that goal. It's called the Social Media DATA Act. And it will create the conditions for platforms like Facebook to share raw data and internal studies with independent researchers in a way that protects intellectual property and privacy.

But that gets at the heart of what these effects are on users, right? I mean, Facebook and platforms like it, they often say that criticisms aren't accurate because reporters and policy makers don't understand the full picture. Well, now they have a chance to ensure that experts can get the full picture. And that starts with making the Social Media DATA Act law. And just to give you a little bit of detail about how it works, in addition to requiring that these large digital platforms, specifically those with more than 100 million monthly active users, publish and maintain an ad library, that's accessible to our academic researchers, this act also will create a working group that's convened by the FTC that would be responsible for publishing guidance on how independent, non-commercial research can be done so that consumers' privacy rights are protected.

That working group will include stakeholders like social media researchers, privacy and civil rights experts, technologists, social media company representatives, and others. And they'll be tasked with publishing a code of conduct for research that utilizes company provided data to ensure that there's no room for violations of user rights. But I do think we need to understand the impact and we can't rely on the platforms to do that research for us. We really do need independent academic researchers so that we can get at the truth.

Justin Hendrix:

In addition to Tech Policy Press, I do research and I teach at NYU in the School of Engineering. Some of my colleagues there were studying Facebook's advertising in particular and using a browser extension to collect data and discovered in the course of their research a bunch of missing posts related to January 6th that they had to query the company about. That's what seemed to prompt Facebook to then kick them off the platform. I assume the Social Media DATA Act would also kind of come with possibly a stick? It would kind of force these platforms to collaborate with researchers?

Rep. Lori Trahan:

I mean, look, this is something that we know just to be true, right? These massive digital platforms like Facebook, they continue to profit hand over fist from targeted ads while bad actors actively exploit their lack of transparency in some cases to harm consumers, right? So when the researchers like those at NYU try to look into it, Facebook does everything possible to lock them out and keep key data shielded from the public and from experts. And they argue that they do it to protect user privacy, but that argument falls flat when we're talking about advertising data that only includes high level aggregated user targeting data. So I think that, that's the approach that we need to take. It's clear that by giving access to these independent researchers, we can understand a whole lot more about what kind of data is collected on people, how that's being used to target advertising and data to users and get at some of those harmful effects that we should absolutely, as legislators, be putting on up guardrails to safeguard users, but especially our children.

Justin Hendrix:

Since I've brought up January 6th- and I know you and your staff had to shelter in place that day and were under threat along with the rest of Congress- I want to bring up yesterday's report in the Journal, the third in the series, which showed how Facebook provokes users, media, politicians, and others towards outrage, drives them towards more negative stances, and how we are even seeing politicians in different parts of the world changing their platforms to try to get some algorithmic juice out of more negative positioning. Did you take a look at that report, and what did you make of it?

Rep. Lori Trahan:

I'm familiar with it, for sure. I think that their researchers have discovered that publishers and influencers, especially in the political space, are optimizing for engagement by reorienting their posts toward outrage and sensationalism. I know in my office, we frequently hear from researchers that study online polarization, political discourse and influence operations. And they have understood that Facebook's algorithms reward sensational content over the last few years. But they simply don't have the same data that Facebook has. And we know that what starts as maybe a fringe conspiracy theory or a point of controversy in the darkest parts of the internet, right? That I can snowball quickly on a platform like Facebook. And we've seen it happen time and time again, particularly when it comes to political rhetoric that grows into threats and violence. And the most egregious example culminated in the January 6th insurrection.

Look, a functioning democracy is predicated on truth, informed and respectful public debate. And Facebook has knowingly designed their platform to achieve the opposite because it boosts their profits. And it's one thing if they acknowledge that publicly, but instead they go further by burying their internal research on the topic and limiting independent research. And so it's the reason why we've crafted legislation. If they're not going to do it themselves, we do need to require that they allow academic and independent researchers access to the necessary data currently under locking key by Facebook and other platforms so they can publish reliable studies on polarization and dangers on their services not just what the companies want us to see.

Justin Hendrix:

This particular set of concerns, going back to social media, teens, children, it is one area where there appears to be some bipartisan agreement. Your colleague, I think of Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican in Washington, for instance, who seems to share some concerns very similar to yours. Do you think this Wall Street Journal report will change anything about work on social media, maybe we could see some bipartisan legislation on these issues coming out of your committee?

Rep. Lori Trahan:

I'm always hopeful. I mean, I have to say when we sit in some of these hearings, especially in March when the CEOs of these majors tech platforms testified, many times we were saying very similar things, right? And I think with Ranking Member Cathy McMorris Rodgers, she's had children herself. I do think that there's agreement that we need privacy legislation, we need to protect our children. And so I do think that this report coming out, just, it adds urgency. There is no question that there's a lot of momentum going toward having comprehensive privacy legislation crafted in past by our committee and by this Congress.

But I think what you will see now is certainly when we get through some of the things that are really taking up headlines right now in terms of bipartisan infrastructure and Build Back Better, that our committee is going to focus on this issue. And I do think that there's a lot of momentum on both sides of the aisle to do that. And so when I think about opportunities for bipartisanship, what better place than to start than protecting our children. And I think that that is a logical place and, frankly, an urgent place for us to start.

Justin Hendrix:

So with the one minute we have left, if it were Mark Zuckerberg on Zoom in front of you again, instead of me, what would you say to him now in September, 2021 having read this Wall Street Journal report?

Rep. Lori Trahan:

Well, I would ask him the same questions that I asked in the letter. When he testified before us in Congress, he only gave us sort of the examples of how social media and our youngest children being onboarded to social media early can benefit them. But in light of this report, I want to know, when did you know about this report? When did you read the results of this report? How could you avert your eyes to these damning statistics and things that really do hurt our youngest users and still, in good faith, talk about launching an Instagram for kids?

I know sometimes that it sounds cliche- I even brought it up in March when he was before me- but we do compare Facebook right now to Big Tobacco because it really feels like we're watching the same story play out. They have the research, they know the problems on their platforms and they have the ability to fix them and they're simply choosing not to. And so my question for him is: why?

Justin Hendrix:

Congresswoman, thank you very much for joining me today.

Rep. Lori Trahan:

Thank you so much. Great talking to you.

Read Rep. Trahan's letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, written with Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL):