Teenage girls say Instagram’s
mental health impacts are no
surprise.
Oct. 5, 2021, 10:35 a.m. ET1 hour ago
1 hour ago
By Erin Woo
Documents that a whistle-blower, Frances Haugen, provided to The Wall Street
Journal showed that Instagram made body-image issues worse for one in three
teenage girls.Credit...Lisa Maree Williams for The New York Times
Annie Zhu got an Instagram account during her freshman year of high school.
At first, she curated her profile carefully, showing off different outfits and looks.
She followed body positivity and body neutrality accounts. But she still
sometimes compared herself with others, and “it can make me feel bad,” she
said.
So when she recently listened to a podcast revealing how Facebook’s research
concluded that Instagram, which it owns, was toxic for teenage girls, she said,
the findings “didn’t surprise me at all.”
“In my past experiences, it has been a huge struggle,” Ms. Zhu, an 18-year-old
Stanford University freshman, said in an interview.
Among young people, the idea that Instagram can hurt someone’s self-image is
widely discussed. Ms. Zhu said she and her friends talked about how social
interactions on Instagram felt inauthentic. Some friends have deleted the app
because they didn’t think it was contributing positively to their lives, she added.
She said she now used Instagram largely as a messaging system and rarely
posted on it.
“If you ask a young person, it’s something you deal with on a daily basis,” said
Vicki Harrison, who directs the Center for Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing
at Stanford. “You don’t need this research to tell you this.”
Ms. Harrison works with the GoodforMEdia project, a peer mentoring initiative
for older teenagers and young adults to share experiences and advice on using
social media. Teenagers she works with have told her that Instagram is often the
hardest platform for them because of how polished users’ social media profiles
are.
Their experiences were echoed in Facebook’s internal research. Documents that
a whistle-blower, Frances Haugen, provided to The Wall Street Journal showed
that Instagram made body-image issues worse for one in three teenage girls.
Facebook has responded that the research did not show a causal link and that a
majority of teenage girls experiencing body-image issues reported that
Instagram either made their body image better or had no impact.
Iris Tsouris, a freshman at Yale University, said Instagram had worsened her
body image issues. While she follows some body positivity accounts, that kind of
content doesn’t show up in the algorithm-curated posts on her Instagram
Explore page — where she instead sees posts about replacing meals with iced
coffee.
Facebook’s research was “not at all” eye-opening to her, she said.
“It perpetuates negative self-image in people, stuff that might feed into eating
disorders,” Ms. Tsouris, 18, said. “I’ve definitely seen people impacted by
jealousy or the fear of missing out.”
Still, some teenagers said they were glad the research was out, even if they were
not sure what it would change.
“The fact that Facebook knows is important,” said Claire Turney, 18, a freshman
at the University of Virginia who attended high school with Ms. Tsouris. “That
they know that it is destructive and they continue to market it to teenage girls is
a little messy in my opinion, but that’s capitalism.”
