Lily Snyder

Wow. So much has happened since I started writing this article. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down. Facebook Whistleblowers seem to be coming out of the woodwork. The Wall Street Journal released a whole series called the Facebook Files.

All those complaints from people saying they won’t use Oculus VR were redeemed when Oculus owners couldn’t be in virtual reality during the outage.

Can we be done with Facebook already?

This article was to quote stats from the WSJ’s Facebook File’s on the negative influence Instagram has on teen’s mental health.

The following are stats from Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic For Teen Girls.

• “Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram, one presentation showed.”
• “Teen boys aren’t immune. In the deep dive Facebook’s researchers conducted into mental health in 2019, they found that 14% of boys in the U.S. said Instagram made them feel worse about themselves. In their report on body image in 2020, Facebook’s researchers found that 40% of teen boys experience negative social comparison.”
• More than 40% of Instagram’s users are 22 years old and younger, and about 22 million teens log onto Instagram in the U.S. each day.

Honestly, don’t we all feel better after a day without Facebook?

Social Comparison: when people assess their own value in relation to the attractiveness, wealth and success of others.

“In one study of teens in the U.S. and U.K., Facebook found that more than 40% of Instagram users who reported feeling “unattractive” said the feeling began on the app.”

Algorithms run our culture.

In this way, Instagram is much like Tik Tok. A WSJ study found that the Tik Tok algorithm sends its users down rabbit holes devised by the algorithm.

In March, the researchers said Instagram should reduce exposure to celebrity content about fashion, beauty and relationships, while increasing exposure to content from close friends, according to a slide deck they uploaded to Facebook’s internal message board.

A current employee, in comments on the message board, questioned that idea, saying celebrities with perfect lives were key to the app. “Isn’t that what IG is mostly about?” he wrote. Getting a peek at “the (very photogenic) life of the top 0.1%? Isn’t that the reason why teens are on the platform?”

Wall Street Journal

Before Facebook, Instagram believed it’s app was a window to other people’s lives. Not necessarily celebrities. It goes to show how quickly a company’s culture can change and original mission lost.

How did the Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp outage affect you?