Facebook Struggles to Quell Uproar Over Instagram's Effect on Teens – The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — Over the past few weeks, top Facebook executives assembled virtually for a series of emergency meetings.In one gathering last weekend, half a dozen managers — including Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, and Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs — discussed pausing the development of an Instagram service for children ages 13 and under, said two people briefed on the meeting. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, weighed in to approve the decision, the people said.The meetings continued this week, with a larger group that included Facebook’s “Strategic Response” teams, which are overseen by Mr. Clegg, the people said. The executives debated what to do about internal research around teenagers and Instagram, they said, and decided to publicly release some information but annotate it to add context.Facebook has been in an uproar over the past few weeks, which the meetings were held to quell. The tumult began after The Wall Street Journal published a series of articles last month that showed Facebook knew about the harms of its services, including teenage girls saying that Instagram made them feel worse about themselves. The articles were based on a trove of Facebook documents, which were leaked by an unidentified…
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