Over 21,000 people signed an open letter urging Facebook to discontinue Messenger Kids, a polarizing communications app for Android and iOS devices that the company introduced late last year with the goal of allowing children under thirteen to use its tools. Authored by the Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood, an organization that already pushed against Messenger Kids, the letter argues Facebook’s mobile app is damaging to preteens, citing studies that show excessive social media use being detrimental to teens, let alone younger, even more impressionable and less emotionally developed individuals.
The thousands of signatures collected by the CCFC came from parents, healthcare professionals, educators, and other individuals seeking to protect children from the dangers of contemporary social media and communications technologies. “Kids need time and space to experience the physical world and develop healthy face-to-face relationships,” the open letter sent last week reads, thus reiterating the argument laid out by the advocacy group in January when the organization called Messenger Kids “irresponsible.” Facebook said it built the service in collaboration with educators and other professionals, though a significant number of experts supporting its initiative have been funded by the social media company itself. The Menlo Park, California-based firm doesn’t show ads within Messenger Kids and claims it isn’t monetizing the service in any other manner. The Android app is also fully compliant with the stateside Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act from 2000, Facebook previously argued.
The company is presently attracting major scrutiny from regulators and the general public in many parts of the world after spending the better part of this spring making headlines due to the revelation of the Cambridge Analytica scandal – a 2014 episode that saw a political consulting firm surreptitiously harvest data on some 87 million Facebook users. Cambridge Analytica is presently in the process of dissolving itself but remained adamant its data mining practices were legal and nothing out of the ordinary in the industry until the very end. Facebook gave no indications it’s considering the possibility of discontinuing Messenger Kids at any point since launching the mobile app in December.