YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said Google’s video platform is beneficial to adolescents’ mental health, amid growing concern that rival Instagram may be “toxic” for teenage girls.
“We certainly do see for a lot of really tough issues that YouTube can be a really valuable resource,” Wojcicki said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “So body positivity, mental health, we see a lot of creators actually talk about mental health and that, for a lot of kids, really it destigmatizes, and enables people to talk about what’s happening and what’s going on with them. So we do take it very seriously.”
The remarks are the first time the leader of the world’s largest video website, owned by Alphabet Inc.’s Google, has responded to a series of Wall Street Journal stories on rival Facebook inc. The newspaper reported that Facebook knew that its photo-sharing app, Instagram, was harmful for the mental health of some teenage girls and didn’t take steps to address the problem. Facebook on Sunday said that while those dealing with body image issues felt Instagram made it worse for them, users coping with loneliness, anxiety, sadness and eating issues said the app helped deal with those issues. The company on Monday also announced it was pausing work on an Instagram site dedicated to children younger than 13 years old.
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YouTube has faced repeated controversies surrounding its content moderation and its app for kids. Google and YouTube paid $170 million to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and New York Attorney General in 2019 for violating the privacy of children without parents’ consent by allegedly tracking them across the web. The site has also been criticized for allowing kids to access content suitable for adults, which Wojcicki said the company has worked to address.
