How serious is Instagram for the mental health of younger users? It’s a very important question, especially with Facebook planning to release a version of the app for kids.
A new report from The Wall Street Journal suggests the answer is “pretty bad,” based on an internal investigation conducted by Facebook that it has refused to share with the public. He WSJ recently He had access to these in-depth studies, which show a bleak picture of the detrimental effects Instagram has on its younger users, especially teens.
For the latter group, Instagram is a powerful engine of “social comparison”: when judging one’s own value, attractiveness, and success based on comparisons with others. Teenage girls often receive images of idealized bodies on Instagram, which appear as ads, images on their feeds, and content on the App Exploration page. This often negatively affects the mental health of these users. As one slide from an internal Facebook presentation put it: “We make body image problems worse for one in three teens.” (The figure referred to teens who already reported some type of body image.)
The report of The Wall Street Journal It’s worth reading in its entirety, but here are some highlights from Facebook’s internal research on the effect Instagram has on younger users:
- A Facebook study of teen Instagram users in the U.S. and UK found that more than 40% of those who declared themselves “unattractive” said feelings started when Instagram was used.
- The review reviewed by Facebook’s top executives concluded that Instagram was designed toward a larger “social comparison” than rival apps like TikTok and Snapchat. TikTok is more focused on performance and Snapchat on prank filters that “keep the focus on the face”. In comparison, Instagram more often highlights the body and lifestyles of users.
- The teens told Facebook researchers that they felt “addicted” to Instagram and wanted to check it less often, but that they didn’t have the self-control to curb its use.
- “Teenagers blame Instagram for the increased rate of anxiety and depression,” said Facebook’s internal investigation presented in 2019 and that “This reaction was unpredictable and consistent across all groups.”
- Facebook found that among teens who said they had suicidal thoughts, 13% of UK users and 6% of U.S. users said these impulses could be tracked on the app.
These findings are significant in themselves, but they become particularly detrimental to Facebook compared to the evasiveness of their public statements. Like the WSJ notes, the company’s top executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have been questioned by politicians like Senator Richard Blumenthal about the effects of their apps on younger users, but have revealed nothing like the detailed results created by their own internal studies. According to the WSJ, the company told senators that its research was proprietary and that “it was kept confidential to promote a frank and open dialogue and a brainstorm internally.”
Senator Blumenthal told the WSJ in an email: “Facebook’s responses were so evasive (they didn’t even answer all of our questions) that they really raise questions about what Facebook could hide […] Facebook seems to be taking a page from the Big Tobacco textbook: targeting teens with potentially dangerous products while masking science in public. “
Facebook has tried to address these issues through changes to Instagram’s user interface, as an experiment to hide as a count (a metric that teens told Facebook worried them about). But the company said the change did not appear to affect much.
“It turned out that it didn’t really change that much about … how people felt or how much they used the experience as we thought,” Instagram boss Adam Mosseri told reporters in May. “It simply came to our notice then. Some people liked it a lot and others didn’t. ” Instead of implementing the change on all users, Instagram remained the default, but gave users the option to turn them off.