Apple and Meta escalate feud over responsibility for protecting children

• Meta suggested that Apple should be responsible for age verification on the App Store.

• It's convenient for Meta, but Apple has lobbied hard to remove any legislation that would require this.

• In the end, it is the parents and the children who lose.

Meta has a problem. Everyone, from his mother to his state attorney general, blames him for his role in the teen mental health crisis.

Last November, Antigone Davis, Meta’s head of global security, published a blog post calling for government regulation of children and teens’ access to Instagram and other social networks. She proposed that Apple and Google take charge of age-restricting and obtaining parental consent through their app stores. She wrote:

It seems like Meta is just trying to avoid having to clean up his own mess.

But Meta is right: he would be It would be much easier for Apple and Google to implement age management at the App Store level rather than leaving it to each individual app.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal this week, Apple is not at all willing to accept this idea. When Louisiana state lawmakers considered a bill that would make app stores responsible for age verification, Apple sent a team of lobbyists to help defeat the bill. It worked: That part of the bill was dropped.

This is another twist in the quiet feud between Meta and Apple. Meta has a grudge against Apple for a number of reasons: Apple hurt its advertising business with the “ask app not to track” feature; its App Store takes a hefty cut of up to 30% on some in-app purchases; and, worst of all, Apple gets away with a sugary, moralistic attitude toward privacy.

It’s easy to imagine why Apple isn’t keen on taking on a project that would age-test all social apps. Apple doesn’t want to deal with age verification because it’s a privacy nightmare. And it probably doesn’t like having to clean up the messes of Meta and TikTok. Plus, Apple already has parental controls and age ratings in the App Store that allow parents to block apps rated above a certain age.

So Apple and Meta are at a standstill.

Everyone seems to agree that young people and social media are a big problem, but there is no clear-cut solution. Age verification isn’t ideal (I certainly don’t want to have to upload my driver’s license to use Instagram), and simply preventing kids under 13 (or 15!) from using these apps doesn’t solve the thorny problem of young people getting depressed once they’re on social media.

Meanwhile, states are passing piecemeal laws on social media and teens. New York passed a bill this summer to ban “addictive” algorithms on young users’ feeds. Other states, including California, Arkansas and Utah, have also tried to pass their own laws regulating social media for teens, but those laws have been challenged by courts under the First Amendment.

The best way to get an immediate change in policy, I think, is for schools to ban cell phones in class. That would probably please teachers and encourage students to pay more attention, but that's only part of the problem.

Both Meta and Apple could do more to solve the kids-and-phones problem — and the government could do the same. For now, parents are on their own.

Read the original article on Business Insider