Study under lock and key: Instagram harms young girls

Instagram is damaging the mental health of many teenagers. The parent company Facebook has apparently deliberately kept internal findings under lock and key.

Anyone who asks young people about their Instagram usage quickly gets critical tones: “We all know how harmful Instagram is, it’s all about comparing,” says Brynn, for example, and Marianne from Los Angeles says: “I’ve got myself felt like an outsider, not belonging, because of Instagram. ” 16-year-old Natalia says she uses the platform less, she sees that many of her friends are obsessed with it: “It creates a lot of false expectations about what people should do. Social media does not represent a person as a whole!”

Facebook kept data under lock and key

The criticism that the Instagram platform primarily has a negative impact on young girls is not new. But apparently the parent company Facebook has kept its own data, which come to this result, under lock and key for years. This was revealed by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

Corresponding documents from an internal presentation were leaked to the journalists, one of the authors of the article, Jeff Horwitz, told the CNBC TV station: “The sentence was: ‘We deteriorate the body image of one in three teenage girls.’ And that can have life-threatening effects. About six percent of users in the US who have injured themselves could directly attribute this to Instagram. ”

Zuckerberg publicly claims the opposite

Particularly spicy: Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg had emphasized before the US Congress that social media had positive effects on people’s mental health.

22 million young people use Instagram every day in the US alone. To communicate with friends, to get information or to chat. Psychologists keep emphasizing that there is a lot of pressure on Instagram when it comes to the perfect pictures. “It leads to not finding yourself good enough, it leads to depression. Eating disorders. It gets bad when you think what you see there is true,” said psychologist Brad Klontz at CNBC.

But Instagram is the gateway to the young target group for the company Facebook, says WSJ journalist Georgia Wells in an interview with Fox News: “Even if Facebook’s data shows that Instagram is harmful for teen girls, they want to reach even more young users. That is vital to sales and they don’t want to harm their platform. “

Facebook interprets numbers differently

Facebook commented on the newspaper’s article in the form of a blog post. It said that 81 percent of young people felt more connected to their friends through social media. 26 percent said they felt worse because of social networks. The journalists of the WSJ had put the study data in a negative light.

You don’t want to change anything on Instagram at first. That is absurd, says psychology professor Jonathan Haidt on US television: “I cannot imagine a product that, if it harms a third of its adult customers, can continue to be on the market.”

Politics increases the pressure on Instagram

In the USA, politics has now also stepped in and put Instagram and parent company Facebook under pressure. It is about the planned project to develop Instagram for children under 13 years of age. Several senators wrote to Zuckerberg to finally give up the plans for such a “children’s Instagram” in view of these findings.