For Teen Girls, Instagram Is a Cesspool
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/teen-mental-hea...
p24. Teens are about twice as likely to state that Instagram improves their mental health than to state that it harms it.
p28. Teens who were already unsatisfied with their mental health tend to think Instagram harms their mental health more than teens who are satisfied with their mental health. Still, teens who are not satisfied with their mental health (in the USA) are more likely to think Instagram is a positive influence on mental health than a negative one. This is not true in the UK.
If you're the kind of person who hates when statistics are abused for a narrative, this should be something you dislike. The "damning internal documents" actually show that 80% of teens have a neutral or positive reaction to Instagram, and teens are two times more likely to have a positive reaction than a negative one.
Zuckerberg's comments about Instagram having an overall positive effect on teen mental health look a lot less like an obvious lie from this angle.
My personal opinion/guess: Instagram and social media does deliver harmful content to some people and can have negative effects on people's mental health. However, in the discussion we've been having this week, every possible positive effect has been discounted to 0 value. That's not really fair, doesn't reflect the actual results of the leaked studies, and certainly doesn't match my anecdotal experience using social media (including fbook, reddit, hn and insta).
It seems to me a case of a drug addict saying that drugs are good for himself. Or an obese person saying that Pizza helps him cope with life.
Is there a better way to independently measure the mental health effect of a single variable on a person's life than just asking them?
It's not showing me the 'reply' button on your comment.
That seems like fair criticism. It's not my area of expertise. I'm just here to post the source document because in light of what the study actually claims, the media reaction has been ridiculous.
- about the reply button, it sometimes happens to me also, maybe a delay or something like that?
answer: yes there are better ways to independently measure mental health than one self-report variable.
Generally in the social sciences you can measure things in a number of broad ways. Generally we refer to a 'construct' - a theoretical description of some phenomenon or set of concepts that is difficult or impossible to measure directly. Basically, it is a definition and the hard part is that you can't directly touch the thing so sometimes these 'variables' have definitions that get argued about in the margins - c.f., motivation, how do you define categorize and measure motivation?
Effectively, we are dealing with ways of evidencing things that are inferred.
There are a couple paradigms of measurement (more than the two I'll mention):
Observation - using some protocol or clear and as objective as possible tool for having a (typically) trained external individual. This can be either an overarching conclusion or observation of specific actions or symptoms:
Self report - relying on the person reporting things. This can be the constructs themselves (not great) or it can be more concrete markers of things (better but still used with caution. The issue here is sometimes lying, sometimes social norming, sometimes self-awareness - all represent sources of error.
Asking self report questions directly isn't inherently bad, but for something like mental health which is a latent construct, a single direct self report question is not going to get you accepted into any serious journal. You might ask 10 or 15 indirect, symptoms based questions, that is called a scale. For example you would ask: "how often over the last two weeks have you felt little interest or pleasure in doing things?" (from the PHQ-9, which implements the DSM-IV clinical criteria from depression).
personal opinion:
The question that the grandparent mentions is "In general, how has instagram affected the way you feel about your mental health?" Asking teenagers that is just...not great research praxis. The reason asking that is not great rather than bad is because it was part of a battery of data that they collected, all of which has to be interpreted together.
For a lot of reasons, likert scale questions like this are bad, particular bad with children (who will tell you what they think you want to here), and increasingly bad in a society where 'please rate my customer service a 10 because a 9 is failing' is the norm. In fact, most respected likert-like scales still see a bias in all answers above the norm - a distributional skew towards the 'good' option whether its agree or better or whatever the scale is. The results of this question alone are not nearly as positive as they are implied to be.
The next slides begin the absolute death for the claim about slide 24 ...
Slide 25 - explains that the positives come from memes and comedians. That drop to 'conversations you have' and 'comments you receive' absolutely wipes out the idea that instagram is a positive. The sorting of this group of categories makes me honestly just sad.
Slide 26 - "While the overall effects of instagram are positive [ed: that is not how I interpret this data], the effects are determined by the moment." I would encourage you to read the quotes.
Slide 27 - "Teens blame instagram for increase in the rates of anxiety and depression among teens" Take a look at the text of this one as well...kids aren't stupid
Slide 28 - "Teens who struggle with mental health say instagram makes it worse"
What collectively this means is - it amplifies. For developing children who already have unstable hormonal and neurological responses, that is like society giving an arsonist a lighter and me claiming its not my fault because I only gave him accelerant. The teens understand this and the data backs them up.
If your consultants bother to categorize the harm your company is doing pulling out one question and oversimplifying the results isn't an effective counter argument.
Not only is there a better way than a single self-report variable - this variable was just plucked completely out of context and a claim made about it that is unsupported.
Does Instagram, knowing this information, have any obligations when making choices that affect teen's mental health? Would making choices which negatively affect teen's mental health be an ethical action? One such choice could be segmenting user's by mental health for the purpose of advertisement. Is such a segmentation ethical? What if doing so increases Instagram's profit (say for example teens who struggle are more susceptible to ads), does that change your answer? Should that change Instagram's answer?
My point is that we are capable and obliged to dive deeply into these questions. 22% of teens[p24] of a total 22M teens(DAU)[1] are negatively affected by Instagram. This is 4.1 million people - not a small number. By stopping short and simply saying teens are twice as likely to benefit than suffer ignores the 4.1 million teens who are suffering. I'm not sure they take much solace that 8.2 million feel better off.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-tox...
I have no idea if any of the recommendations at the end of the study were actually put into action.
To me a charitable interpretation of the tone of this presentation, which focuses on highlighting negative outcomes rather than celebrating positive outcomes, was to identify areas for improvement. Again, interpreting charitably, this means the company is interested in identifying and reducing negative impacts.
Again, I don't know if they ever made any of these changes. I would like to see more transparency from the company.
At the time that I left Instagram in early 2020, there were more people working on improving wellbeing, particularly for teens, than working on trying to improve engagement. I wasn't specifically tasked to work on well-being, but like all engineers working on recommendations I was required to work with wellbeing and completely address all well-being concerns before shipping anything.
Sick and tired of this world. Hope somebody else has the energy to fight, because I know I don't.
Additionally, if you can become part of a supportive social circle it is much easier to have an attitude like: "There's a lot of trouble in the world, but lets enjoy life where we can and be kind to one another while pushing for positive change where possible."
> Male virginity is toxic (incel)
This is the one that gets to me the most.
Being involutary celibate, or even just having a dry run for a long time, is kind of like hell for a man. I'm not sure if women are capable of just appreciating how painful it is (judging by comments I read on line, they think it's a joke). Even men who have regular sex don't understand it, or quickly forget what it was like.
> Male feminity is a weakness (soy boy), and a Male's duty is to protect females.
These are not bad things. Male's duty is to protect. Not females as a class: the females and children in your family (wife, sister, mother).
In fact, this is the thing that gives meaning to your life. If you're not capable of protecting your family, what are you good for? I'm not saying this as an attack. I'm saying that this is the internal voice in every man's head.
The closest someone like The Rock gets to admitting using them starts with "one time in college...". When even his use is a debate, good luck convincing someone that a slightly smaller actor gaining 25 lbs of muscle in a few months isn't normal. As they happily tell you in interviews, gaining muscle like that is just a matter of working out 6 hours a day and only eating broccoli, chicken, and rice.
1. "Steroids" isn't very accurate. Other things like HGH and SARMs are common, and steroids these days would often be called "testosterone replacement".
Without a commitment to screening advertisements and paid partnerships (which are arguably more damaging) for selling ridiculous psuedo-science like 'detox tea' to young women and girls this rings empty. While social media companies remain in the business of selling advertisement space, they can't be trusted to not tell anyone of any age that they aren't good enough in some way; there's simply too much money in it.
Here in the UK we have CBeebies and CBBC.
Luckily, I had a parent that mostly said "no," and that was the end of it.
If I was your vice emperor, I would agree btw.
In an ideal world we would all have the mental fortitude to dismiss such things but who hasn't had a moment where they felt inferior to others, especially at a young age?
Unfortunately. a huge swath of all products marketed to young girls—many from blue chip companies—is stuff like this.
I pretty much like every outcome.
Outcome A) A couple indictments to some small/large advertisers freaks all the other advertisers out and they stop pursuing that kind of platform or offering that kind of service. This outcome exists whether the wire fraud or conspiracy to wire fraud charges are successfully challenged and restricted in appeals court or not.
Outcome B) Massive indictments to advertisers of all sizes as well as the ad platforms effectively stamp out this kind of business as a concept. The criminal nature of the indictment allows for seizure and leaking of all kinds of information supporting the need for greater disruption and reform.
Outcome C) The wire fraud and wire fraud conspiracy statutes are challenged and invalidated. Reducing the role of the government in every day life.
I like every outcome here.
The summaries of the research on social media and teens that I've heard suggest the largest burden on their mental health is from the way the platforms channel interactions with their peers into feelings of social-exclusion and inadequacy, rather than exploitation by advertisers.
The ads are easy to spot as a problem, because there is a lot of shelling of garbage, but they are just funders. For FB, it's probably easier to change who pays Instagram for engagement, than how they get engagement at all.
I know people who cut themselves because of Instagram and not feeling adequate enough. I think there’s a similar version of this with competency for males. The feeling that you will never be good at what you do or that you need to do something to get there just hasn’t been exploited yet.
Not exactly. The pickup artist community and the alt-right use alpha and beta a lot, but the "sigma" stuff is just pure parody.
I'm pretty sure the same was true 20 years ago and back then it was mainstream media that made them feel worse.
Are we really going to blame Instgram/FB for every societal problem?
Also just a reminder that most teenagers have migrated to TikTok/Snapchat. Instagram is just celebrities and influencers now while Facebook is for keeping contact with relatives.
Fashion media, more specifically, and they were targeted for it much the same way Facebook is now, and for the same reason: it was a conscious, commercially engineered and manipulated effect intimately tied to marketing/advertising.
But yeah, people will blame anyone and anything rather than take (and learn) responsibility, so don't expect anything to be solved anytime soon.
Probably. Although fat teens used to be very rare. Look at 1950s high school graduation group photos. The combination of the snack food industry and the fat acceptance industry has changed the world. Not for the better.
The video was made by another child, from some random place on the Internet: a teenage girl in the video, staring at the camera with a bland, vacant smile that looked like she had been lobotomized.
The captions on the video had her asking these question of her audience:
- How old did they think they would be when they died?
- How did they think they will die?
- How would they choose to die if you could control your own death?
It was pretty clear that this was skirting around the idea of suicide, albeit in a fascination-of-the-macabre way I think, rather than explicitly encouraging it. Very creepy though.
Apple iPad. TikTok video, reposted to YouTube. Viewed on my watch, while I was the adult in charge.
"You can go kill yourself and others, just don't use our platform for any content about it."
I don't particularly like that this article tries to absolve Facebook. OK, maybe Facebook doesn't have any particular line of code "for (user in users) if user.girl: user.show(eating_disorder)" BUT they are getting paid to promote accounts with beauty advertisements, and they know those accounts promote eating disorders. That is clearly not in the public interest.
It goes the other way too: since most people are fat losing weight is seen as a good thing, and people are constantly on a "diet" which they constantly complain about.
It's not just Instagram, it's not even just celebrities, it's a lot of society. A "healthy" human body is neither super skinny not super fat, and a "healthy" human body is actually usually attractive. But a lot of people don't realize.
Here's a recent video filter: https://www.reddit.com/r/Instagramreality/comments/q44txx/do...
Especially with the popular influencers doing this and when you see most of the comments impressed with how the "exercise" is helping vs how it's really a filter. https://www.reddit.com/r/Instagramreality/comments/pwvs83/re...
I am not sure how to really do this. If you tell someone in the age of 10-14 that everything on certain sites is probably fake or misleading, are they going to understand that? I thought I did at that age but that capacity may have been limited to certain topics and contexts e.g click-bate ads are a lot easier to mentally filter out than sponsored Instagram/FB posts.
And of course try to raise them with good values and a solid emotional base to make good decisions with.
All the top landscape photographers now have to use Instagram as their primary online marketing platform. Landscape photos look horrible at Instagram-size (even on the desktop the size and resolution is horrible) unless you boost the colors and jazz them up to a ludicrous degree.
I'm on a lot of overlander forums, in the US and international. We never once see the top #VANLIFE Instagram stars unless they're trying to promote something. I'm convinced they get the sunset shot (10x likes if the woman is wearing a thong), then go stay in a hotel with all their influencer $$.
I could go on. Basically Instagram destroys everything industry and hobby it touches. It's still fine for sharing travel pics with your friends though.
Big brother facebook, cousin whatsapp - and even twitter, snapchat and tiktok on the other side of the tracks can actually say that they can fulfill a useful purpose.
Instagram just seems to go out of their way to ensure nothing of any importance can be transmitted on the platform. Crappy little pictures with some token text, just enough to plug the sponsor.
I think my point was I just don't see how it's healthy to anyone. If a magic wand was waved and instragram vanished - I can't even imagine a downside.
This is worth noting though. In a world where top twitch streamers make millions, are young women wrong to prioritize their appearance? Is it not a major factor in socioeconomic success?
This subreddit should really be propagated around, and all the kids should see it.
From the poses, which make you seem a lot thinner, to pure photoshop... sadly, (almost) noone cares.
But some ad blockers, like Brave's "Shields" feature, manage to block NYT's tracking so that every article appears as if it is the first article you read this month.
70 years ago: "atheists and communists are hurting our children"
35 years ago: "drugs are hurting our children"
25 years ago: "violent video games are hurting our children"
Now: "social media is hurting our children"
All were/are probably true to some extent in some cases, but that does not mean that it necessarily made/makes sense to try to turn society against the risky or dangerous thing. Skateboarding hurts some children. Does that mean that we should ban TV shows that celebrate skateboarding? "It is for the sake of the children" is a time-tested way to get people to support authoritarian policies.