Sen. Richard Blumental asked a top Facebook executive on Thursday if the company would “commit to ending ‘finsta’” – apparently unaware of the term’s true meaning.
Blumenthal (D-Conn.) questioned Facebook’s Global Head of Safety Antigone Davis as part of a Senate committee hearing that followed a Wall Street Journal report that the company’s internal research had found its platform Instagram makes “body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.”
There were several seconds of silence before Davis answered.
“Senator, again, let me explain,” she began. “We don’t actually – we don’t actually do ‘finsta’.
“What ‘finsta’ refers to is young people setting up accounts where they may want to have more privacy,” she went on. “You referred to it as privacy from their parents. In my interaction with teens, what I’ve found is that they sometimes like to have an account where they can interact just with a smaller group of friends.”
Blumenthal, head of the Senate Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security, pressed Davis toward the end of the three-hour hearing.
“Well, ‘finsta’ is one of your products or services,” Blumenthal said. “We’re not talking about Google or Apple, it’s Facebook, correct?”
“‘Finsta’ is slang for a type of account,” Davis answered.
“OK, will you end that type of account?” Blumenthal asked again.
After a pause, Davis admitted: “I’m not sure I understand exactly what you’re asking. What I can say is that based on what we’ve seen in terms of teens using those kinds of accounts, we’ve actually given them additional privacy options to address those kinds of issues, where they want more privacy so that they can have more privacy.”
“Well, I don’t think that’s an answer to my question,” Blumenthal said after a few seconds of silence before wrapping up the hearing.
Congressional hearings involving tech companies have sometimes seen middle-aged and older lawmakers occasionally struggling to keep abreast of the topic. One such moment came in 2018, when then-Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) asked Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg: “How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?”
“Senator,” Zuckerberg answered. “We run ads.”