Zuckerberg: Letting Kids Onto Facebook "Not Top Of The List"

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg says comments he made last week at an education conference about wanting to open the site up to kids under 13 were taken out of context. “That’s just not top of the list of things for us to figure out right now,” he told attendees at a conference in Paris.

As transcribed by PaidContent, Zuckerberg told the audience at the eG8 Forum in Paris that “we just haven’t gone there yet. We haven’t tried to figure our how to make a service that’s accessible to people under 13.”

We’re doing a lot of things right now … but we’re not trying to work on the ability for people under 13 to sign up.

In the future, it makes sense to explore that. We would need to try to figure out a lot of ways to make sure they are safe. That’s extremely important. That’s not on the top of the list for things for us to figure out right now.

“The current regulations make it difficult for people aged under 13 to use Facebook,” Zuckerberg said. Citing research by Consumer Reports showing that there are 7.5 million children under 13 using the service, some advocates have argued that it’s not difficult enough. Last week, Consumers Union sent a letter to the Facebook founder saying that “more needs to be done to keep underage users off the site and to protect teen privacy.”

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