The Wall Street Journal obtained a treasure trove of internal documents from Facebook that exposes company conundrums ranging from which elite users get exempted from normal rule enforcement to whether the social media giant should alter its algorithm to reduce rage among users. But the revelation generating the most horror across the political spectrum is that the company has known and admitted multiple times over the years that Instagram has a quantifiable effect on the self-esteem and body image of its young users.
A 2019 slide of research noted that the photo-sharing app makes body image issues worse for 1 in 3 teenage girls and that teenagers across the board blame the brand for depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts.
These findings fit with a thesis presented by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who found that around 2012, young people across countries and continents reported a sharp uptick in depression and anxiety. Haidt and Facebook both correctly attribute the trend to sites such as Instagram.
But why 2012 and why Instagram? The developed world has had internet access for half of a century, and the first users of LiveJournal and MySpace are now middle-aged. Teenagers used Tumblr and Friendster for years without suffering the adverse mental health effects now experienced by vast swaths of Generation Z. So, what gives?
Namely, platforms such as Facebook and Flickr were social media. On the other hand, Instagram and TikTok are anti-social media.
Millennials use Facebook to connect with real-life friends. The very word explains that the relationship was mutual. On MySpace, you could follow public pages for people such as singers or actors. But it was as professional and sterile as visiting a separate website with tour dates or media appearances.
Instagram changed the entire dynamic. Instead of becoming “friends” with someone, you “followed” them, creating an entire cultural cache associated with the “ratio.” Having followers was important. Following even fewer people was even more so.
Back in my day (a decade ago), we went to great lengths to keep our Facebook accounts private, lest a future college admissions officer or employer see a red Solo Cup and assume the worst. But as the culture became more permissive, younger students grew less paranoid of getting busted for having a beer or a bong in the background of a photo, and so, they put their accounts on public and adopted the medium designed for public consumption.
Posting an Instagram photo was no longer about impressing the cute boy in your chemistry class. It was about impressing every potential follower on the planet. In high school, I had a hundred Instagram followers whom I all knew personally. Users these days have thousands of followers, but it is impossible to know, let alone be friends with, them all.
The problem isn’t social media as a premise. It’s turning such platforms into a metric for measuring a person’s worth.
