Facebook knows Instagram is dangerous. Who else should?
It’s an easy answer, really.
Facebook’s own research shows a “significant teen mental-health issue that Facebook plays down in public”.
The mental health issue is hardly surprising:
- “Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,”
- “We [Facebook, that is] make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls”
Again, this is hardly surprising. Sad, yes, surprising no: “Expanding its base of young users is vital to the company’s more than $100 billion in annual revenue”.
There is a wrong “we” there
The only issue I have with those “findings” is the “we, Facebook” part of the second bullet. It should read _“We PARENTS make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” by letting them use, without any support. something they cannot obviously handle by themselves.
On a related, (wrongly) funny note…
The same article reports that Instagram head Adam Mosseri said “he believes Facebook was late to realizing there were drawbacks to connecting people in such large numbers”. Just another example of the arrogance and immaturity with which a bunch of kids went head first into something bigger than they could ever master, thanks to politicians, and many other, looking the other way.
Image source: How Instagram Hiding Likes Affects Your Mental Health
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
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