Who would have expected that it would be the business-oriented Wall Street Journal (WSJ), of all papers, that in its investigative special this September would uncover information from Facebook’s internal documents about how the American giant prefers fat profits at the expense of the mental health of its users, above all teenage girls? In an excellent series of articles called “The Facebook Files” we read, among other things, that Facebook keeps a special list of VIP users to whom the standard rules and restrictions on publishing posts do not apply. What interested me most, however, was the article of 13 September 2021 devoted precisely to the effects of the Instagram app on the psyche of teenage girls, though not only theirs.
You see, I have an eleven-year-old niece. And even though her parents have so far forbidden her to use smart devices and social media, it is only a matter of time before she plugs into the digital Matrix of likes, selfies, fake news and the perfect lives of celebrities and other quasi-important people. As someone who studies the effects of technologies on human lives, I do have an idea of how social media manipulate us, but because social media manipulate us subliminally, at the level of emotions and not of reason (they target our desire to belong somewhere), even the more hardened and the professionally trained fall for them more than once. That is why we should not turn down a rare opportunity to look at what Facebook itself found out in its internal audit about the effects of its Instagram app on people’s lives. And it is not a pretty sight.
Thanks to the journalists at the WSJ, we have learned that over the past three years Facebook itself actively looked into the effects of its apps on the psyche of millions of teenagers. The researchers of this American technology company found that although social media can have several positive effects on users’ lives, for a large percentage of them, above all teenage girls, its products are literally toxic. The internal audit focuses specifically on Instagram, which, with its emphasis on photographs, does differ from the other apps in something important. While the social network Facebook emphasises comments and the sharing of informational content, the younger additions to the social media family – Snapchat and TikTok – attract users with an attractive, slightly chaotic design, but above all, for the “ADHD generation”, with an emphasis on short videos and loops, in which the point is to outdo one another in who uploads the more sophisticated sketch or applies funny digital face filters more creatively. Instagram, however, focuses on photos of toned bodies and on the photogenic lives of the famous, the beautiful and the rich, which are the dominant lure for users. This is confirmed by Facebook employees themselves in a leaked post on an internal discussion forum, which states that the perfect lives of celebrities are the key to Instagram’s success: “Isn’t that what IG is all about?” getting a glimpse of “the (very photogenic) life of the top 0.1% of people? Isn’t that the reason teens are on our platform?”.
Mark Zuckerberg and his crew are well aware of the present and future importance of teenagers for the social media business. Let us recall that in 2012 Facebook spent one billion dollars buying Instagram, which was then a small startup with just 13 employees. The purchase of Instagram did not happen in that year by chance. As the WSJ analysis claims, according to some internal documents it was precisely in 2012 that Facebook first registered a decline in the number of users in the teenage category. By buying Instagram, Facebook thus made sure it would remain a relevant player for this young group of users, who increasingly prefer the quick and easy sharing of visual content to text communication, which is by now “outdated”.
A business model built on photos
The emphasis on the visual presentation of information also plays an important role in the problems that teenage girls themselves experience when using Instagram. Specifically, the WSJ journalists report on a piece of Facebook research that Facebook’s researchers mentioned in one of their presentations from March 2020: it shows that “thirty-two per cent of teenage girls said that when they feel bad about their bodies, Instagram makes them feel worse”. Another internal presentation slide, from 2019, claims that Instagram “made body image issues worse for one in three teenage girls”. Although Facebook’s researchers did not ask the respondents about the effect of Instagram on teenagers’ mental health, in another presentation we read that “teens blame Instagram for increases in anxiety and depression” and that “this reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups”.
Social comparison theory
The Wall Street Journal writes that Facebook investigated why it is specifically Instagram that is such a toxic app for teenage girls. In five presentations in all over the past 18 months, Facebook also looked at the role played by the phenomenon of “social comparison” and why it concerns Instagram in particular, rather than social media as such. This “social comparison theory” was put forward long before the advent of the internet, in 1954, by the American social psychologist Leon Festinger. Roughly speaking, the theory explains that people form a picture of their own worth (self-evaluation), of their opinions, of the attractiveness of their appearance and of their value systems on the basis of comparison with other people. Festinger points out that we compare ourselves above all with people who are close to us on the imaginary social ladder. In other words, we will tend to compare ourselves with our classmates at school, with colleagues at work or with people living near us, rather than with some celebrity whose life is too remote from ours for us to drastically adjust our behaviour on the basis of it. Under normal circumstances we compare ourselves “upwards” only with people slightly better than us, when we want to be inspired to some personal improvement (education, a firmer body, travel and so on). Conversely, we compare ourselves “downwards” with people who are only a little worse off than we are. The reason is that an all too brilliant model will be unattainable for us, and so it will not serve as an inspiration but will lead to negative feelings. Comparing ourselves, on the other hand, with someone who leads a markedly worse life than ours will not bring us the coveted warm feeling of satisfaction that our life is better.
Old and new media: from celebrities to classmates
Most of us can probably recall a situation when our nieces, daughters, sons (or even we ourselves) were in a bad mood because some celebrity on TV or online looked a good deal better, or because this or that athlete was so much better. Comparing ourselves with others is nothing new and has been part of our behaviour since time immemorial. Television, radio and print, that is, the so-called old media, make the most of it too. The whole category of tabloid newspapers de facto exploits the human tendency to establish our worth (in the absence of other indicators) by how we measure up against the most successful people. Readers may be surprised that even after some seventy years of the women’s emancipation movement and of the systematic demolition of myths and stereotypes by the humanities and social sciences, empirical surveys tell us that women of the millennial generation (born 1975 to 2000) still seek out news and tabloids devoted to celebrities (47% of women versus 23% of men), style and fashion (44% versus 10%) or health and fitness (49% versus 32%) more than men do. In the old media, hardly anyone sees at regular intervals, if at all, the wonderful lives of their friends, classmates or colleagues from work, because for economic reasons the old media cannot afford to pay for airtime spent on people nobody knows and who have no commercial value for the medium in question. In short, then, the old media offer us comparison only with the celebrities and athletes who are the most interesting for the media. Psychologically, however, their lives are remote from us: we have never met them and they will never be part of our everyday lives.
New media, social networks included, are different in this respect. It is no longer the directors or producers of large media houses who decide who appears on the screens in our bedrooms. New media have democratised the media space, so that if we are interested (and it turns out we are), our friends and colleagues can appear on our computer and mobile screens. In the history of media, and indeed of human existence, this is a fundamental turning point and an unprecedented situation. We now have the opportunity to compare ourselves with our peers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And although at the rational level we know that we should not spend so much time on Facebook or Instagram, the millions-of-years-old emotional parts of our brains prevail and we cannot help ourselves. And it turns out that the ones most addicted to this social-media digital drug are precisely teenage girls.
In another study, focused on American and British teenagers, Facebook found, as the WSJ reports, that more than 40% of Instagram users say they feel “unattractive” and that this feeling began after they started using the app. An important piece of information from the uncovered documents is that further research says that teenage Instagram users know the app is harmful to them and want to spend less time on it, but do not have the willpower to do so. According to Facebook’s internal research, teenage users say they feel “addicted”, but that they cannot help it, because they feel obliged to be online so as not to miss anything important.
Cold data and real lives
Besides the raw data and the analysis of the documents, the WSJ’s investigative article makes a fairly decent attempt to give the topic a concrete human face as well. It mentions its interview with the students Destinee Ramos (17) and Isabel Yoblonski (18). They told the WSJ that during the coronavirus pandemic they felt all the more need to be online on Instagram: “if you wanted to show your friends what you were doing, you had to go on Instagram”. The students also took part in a national student science competition, for which they carried out a questionnaire survey on the mental health of their peers in relation to their use of social media. They found that of 98 respondents, roughly 90% confirmed that social media make their mental health worse.
For another student, Molly Pitts (17), Instagram was a way of finding out, after moving to a new high school, which boys and girls were the most popular in her new class. All she had to do was look up the Instagram profiles of her new classmates, and from the number of “followers” she worked out which of them it was good to hang out with. Molly told the WSJ journalists that it feels to her as if all her classmates had the number of their social media followers tattooed on their foreheads. Personally, reading these sentences in the WSJ article sent a chill down my spine, and I thought of the social credit system in China, or of the episode “Nosedive” of the dystopian (and excellent) series Black Mirror, which depicts a world where absolutely everything we do is rated by other people through a mobile app in which every person has their own number representing their social popularity and, de facto, their human worth. This number is publicly available, and basically anyone can raise or lower your number in the course of the day depending on how nice you are to them (in plain terms, how much you “suck up” to them). In such a world there is no need for a dictator threatening military occupation: people censor themselves and hardly anyone dares to say anything that would deviate from the mainstream thinking of the society in question. It leads to grey mediocrity, cliché on every corner and enormous superficiality at every level of society. But enough about our world, and back to Instagram.
(The series Black Mirror, episode Nosedive)
Algorithms, likes and addictions
The whole situation with Instagram addiction is made worse by the “Explore” feature. Using algorithms, it suggests content in the app specifically for the given user, according to what the user has previously searched for or “liked”. Once a user searches for or likes, say, a video on losing weight and strengthening the glutes, the Instagram algorithm in the Explore tab will display further popular workout videos that try to motivate people to lose weight but at the same time depict hard-to-attain ideals, thereby triggering in many users anxious and depressive states brought on by the thought that they are not good enough.
According to the internal documents, Facebook actively tried to reduce Instagram’s negative effects by experimenting for a long time with the option of hiding the number of “likes”, which contributed significantly to the anxiety of many users. Hiding likes was tested within a project called Project Daisy. Again thanks to Facebook’s internal documents from 2020, however, we know that this option did not improve users’ mental health. Nevertheless, in May this year Facebook and Instagram launched the option of hiding “likes” for all users. According to the WSJ report, this was mainly at the instigation of senior Facebook managers, who believed that publicly unveiling the new feature would help Facebook look as though it really cared about the mental health of its users: “A Daisy launch would be received by press and parents as a strong signal that Instagram cares about its users, especially when taken alongside other positive-leaning launches we will be rolling out”. Facebook did indeed promote its intention to improve its image on a massive scale. The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, was given the special task of making the app a safe and special place for users. At the beginning of the year he gave an interview to the New York Times in which Mosseri claims that a certain hysteria and critical reactions are common to all kinds of new media. He claims that already in ancient Greece people criticised the philosopher Plato because he began to write his thoughts down, whereas the dominant view at the time was that writing would destroy the ability to remember things. Mosseri is right. We find the question of the influence of writing (more generally, of literacy) on the ability to remember things in the well-known Platonic dialogue Phaedrus. But he forgets that the effects of any technology can never be estimated in advance, and from the history of media and technology we know that we begin to feel the real effects of technical innovations only after a long delay, decades, sometimes even centuries after the technology in question first spread among people in society. Whatever we think of this philosophical debate about the influence of media and technologies, the fact is, as the WSJ reminds us, that Mosseri was forced to admit publicly that Project Daisy did not actually improve the situation much. Mosseri nevertheless remains optimistic that Instagram will manage to find the right remedy for identifying in time the users for whom using Instagram may really become problematic.
What do the experts say?
Despite all the evidence and the existing psychological and sociological theories suggesting that the social network Instagram can be a dangerous app for teenagers, and above all for the teenage girls already mentioned, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared at a hearing in the US Congress in March 2021 that “The research that we’ve seen is that using social apps to connect with other people can have positive mental-health benefits”. In other words, smoking is good for you, nothing to worry about. The well-known columnist Jonathan Freedland rightly asks in the British Guardian whether we are not all, by any chance, the digital smokers of the 21st century, and Facebook the head of the tobacco industry, trying to con everyone into believing that consuming Facebook is healthy, and the more the better.
What do the experts say about the situation with Instagram? The WSJ, for example, quotes Angela Guarda, director of the eating disorders programme at the major American Johns Hopkins Hospital, who also works as an associate professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She says she has dealt with many parents who complain that their children have picked up various tips from social networks on how to restrict their food intake or induce vomiting. Guarda estimates that for roughly half of her patients, Instagram and other social media are to blame for these problems.
(Photo source: Ben Weber on Unsplash)
Currently, probably the best-known American academic working on the effects of social media on children and adults is the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. I recommend his book written together with Greg Lukianoff – The Coddling of the American Mind – in which the authors try to make sense of what is currently happening in American society, above all at American universities, where an ever greater number of students show mental health problems and anxiety, demand strict punishment of so-called “microaggressions” and require teachers to warn them in advance of unpleasant content in the book or material being discussed (so-called trigger warnings), and last but not least Haidt and Lukianoff note the growing self-censorship of teachers.
Haidt began studying the effects of social media around 2015, and he is a proponent of social comparison theory as one of the main causes of the crisis of mental health problems among teenage girls. In a podcast for the Australian, conservative-leaning magazine Quillette, Haidt claims that Instagram drastically worsens the ordinary anxieties of teenage girls concerning appearance and status within the peer group, as well as indirect bullying, which among girls takes the form not of physical but of verbal aggression, through spreading gossip and social ostracism. Haidt claims that not all digital media have the same negative effects. He notes, for example, that teenage boys spend much more time than girls playing computer games. According to Haidt, computer games really do have positive effects on boys’ development, because they favour real-time communication, the need to learn discipline, the ability to cooperate and so on. Whereas Instagram is about indirect communication, where girls are encouraged to photograph their bodies and their lives and then wait for “likes” that validate their appearance and their position within the peer group of friends, above all other girls. Haidt also confirms what the students mentioned earlier said: prestige and social standing on Instagram really do spill over more and more into prestige in real life.
Even though, according to Haidt, it is impossible to ban children from social networks across the board, parents should start informing themselves more about the effects of social media on children’s development, and also start demanding that their politicians make it possible to raise by law the minimum age for using apps like Instagram. Ideally, Haidt would set the limit at 16 and over, but he believes a more realistic option is to allow children social media from the age of 14.
Mark Zuckerberg invited Haidt to Facebook twice to discuss the potential negative effects of social apps. According to the WSJ, Zuckerberg let it be known that the current research on the relationship between teenagers’ mental health and their use of social media is still inconclusive and does not show clearly enough that social media are the direct culprit in the growing mental health crisis among teenagers.
On the one hand, Zuckerberg was right. The research around 2019 was not clear. The trouble, however, is that science needs a large amount of data for any clear conclusions, and that data was not available. And that is because all the data on the use of Facebook or Instagram is owned by Facebook itself, and as a commercial entity it is not – yet – obliged to share its internal and proprietary data with researchers and universities.
But that may easily change. Thanks in part to the investigative work of the Wall Street Journal journalists, we have finally learned, for the first time, that Zuckerberg most likely lied and that Facebook had for a long time possessed a wealth of data and research revealing Instagram’s real harmful effects.
The next step could be some form of regulation and a requirement for transparency of the data and algorithms of apps like Facebook and Instagram. If people, and parents above all, begin to demand that the modern-day tobacco industry, which social media are becoming through their harmful effects, be placed under greater supervision and be willing to share its internal data, we will have a better overview of what perhaps the most important social technologies of the 21st century are doing to us. For now we are condemned to believe the tobacco seller that cigarettes are not unhealthy for us but actually beneficial. Parents are usually horrified the first time they see their 14-year-old daughter smoking on the corner by the school. Perhaps it is time for them to react just as critically when their daughter sets up an Instagram profile. I will do my utmost so that my niece feels no need to define the worth of her humanity through scantily clad selfies and likes on social networks. If that makes me a political dinosaur, I accept the label gladly and willingly.
Sources[1]
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/08/facebook-tobacco-industry-research-harm-causes
https://quillette.com/2021/10/04/instagram-and-the-teen-girl-mental-health/