Pinterest launches the Inspired Internet Pledge

At Cannes Lions today, Pinterest announced itself as the first signatory to the Inspired Internet Pledge, a commitment seeking to address the growing mental health problems said to be associated with social media. 

The pledge has been launched by the image-sharing and social media service in collaboration with the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children's Hospital. 

What is the Inspired Internet Pledge? 

The Inspired Internet Pledge is a call for tech companies and the industry to work collaboratively towards a common goal of making the internet a healthier and kinder place for young people – taking meaningful and measurable actions to support more positive mental and emotional wellbeing outcomes.

Three principles for signatories

• Tuning for wellbeing. Understand which actions and content correlate with wellbeing outcomes. Use the outcomes you discover to help build and evolve your products to support healthier experiences on and offline. “We need emotional wellbeing to be a real and measurable result, and the standard for all of us in the industry,” said Pinterest CEO Bill Ready.
  
  A University of California Berkeley study looked at the impact of 10 minutes on Pinterest among university students and found that active engagement with inspiring content on Pinterest buffered against rising burnout, stress and social disconnectedness.
  
  
• Listen and act: Listen to and learn from those who have experienced harm online and then act on what you learn, whether that’s from third-party data or directly from young people themselves.
  
  Pinterest forbids body shaming on the platform, which meant it had to stop accepting aggressive weight-loss advertising. “We knew that those ads were negatively impacting the emotional wellbeing of our users because we were measuring outcomes and we were listening to experts,” explained chief marketing and communications officer Andréa Mallard. 

• Commit to sharing: Open source your knowledge on this topic. Share failures, share metrics, share product changes that result in outcomes that are tied to wellbeing.
  
  Pinterest no longer relies on the length of a view to inform what is shown next, preferring more active choices. “We call them inspired engagements,” said the CEO. “When we organise Pinterest by inspired engagements, like saves, the content that jumps to the top is positive and more action oriented. It’s step-by-step guides, self-care ideas, how-to videos, inspirational quotes. One side [AI-driven] is addictive. One side [active choices] is additive.”

Key quote

“If the AI can be tuned to maximise view time, at the expense of making people feel worse, it can also be tuned to be more positive too” – Bill Ready, CEO at Pinterest. 

BEC