Written evidence submitted by Facebook [MISS0069]

Rt Hon Caroline Nokes MP

Chair, Women and Equalities Committee House of Commons

Palace of Westminster SW1A 0AA

Dear Caroline,

Thank you for the opportunity to give evidence to the Women and Equalities Committee’s inquiry into body image.

As I mentioned in the session, I wanted to write to set out further details about our approach to protecting our younger users from inappropriate posts and behaviour.

Facebook, Instagram and Messenger require everyone to be at least 13 years old before they can create an account (in some jurisdictions, this age limit may be higher). It violates our terms of services to provide a false age when creating an account, and where we find an account that breaks this rule, we remove it. Anyone can report an underage account on Facebook and Messenger by filling out this form and on Instagram by filling out this form.

We have Community Standards in place to help protect all our users from content or activity that might be abusive or harmful. However, in order to keep our younger users safe, we have also developed several policies and tools that only apply to users between the ages of 13 and 18.

For example, on Facebook:

• We have special settings for teens that means the default setting for the availability of posts they make is set to ‘friends only’, and we prevent their sensitive information such contact info, school or birthday appearing to a public audience.

• If teens select to share more widely than the default “friends only” we provide tailored educational messages specifically when they choose to share publicly for the first time

• We also switch off location sharing by default for users under 18. When a teen turns on location sharing, we include a consistent indicator of this as a reminder that they're sharing their location.

Written evidence submitted by Facebook [MISS0069]

• Through the services, we provide educational signposting to teen users about who they're sharing with, and to remind them that they should only accept friend requests from people they know.

• We also take steps to limit connections between under-18s and adults. For instance, an adult cannot initiate Messenger chats with minors they are not connected to, for instance through friends of friends. Profiles of people under 18 years old also do not appear in search tools outside of Facebook.

• On our video services like Watch, we age-gate mature content at 14+ and 18+ for funded content, 18+ for all else. The age gating process also prevents 18+ content from being recommended to younger viewers

• Lastly, under-18s also do not have access to many services offered by our app, such as Marketplace, Mentorships, Fundraisers, Dating, Blood Donation and Watch.

When it comes to ensuring those under 18 on our platform see content that is appropriate to them, the challenges differ to those of ensuring under 13s do not access our platform at all. We are confident that we already have many protections in place, but we are focusing on our approach to identify under 18s as a further step to continue improving our approach to age- appropriate experiences more broadly.

Yours sincerely, Richard Earley

Public Policy Manager, UK

Facebook

January 2021