![]() ![]() “Being surrounded by constant images of the ‘perfect’ life and seemingly perfect bodies can also have a big impact on how you feel about your own life and appearance, and it can be really hard not to compare yourself to others,” Thomas said.Ī spokesperson for 5Rights Foundation, which campaigns for changes to digital services to make them more suitable for children and young people, said: “Facebook’s own research is a devastating indictment of the carelessness with which it, and the tech sector more broadly, treats children. Emma Thomas, the charity’s chief executive, said that while social media could be beneficial, it also came with increased pressures. In 2017, YoungMinds and the Royal Society for Public Health published research singling out Instagram as having the most negative impact on young people’s mental wellbeing of all social networks. Another transatlantic study found more than 40% of Instagram users who reported feeling “unattractive” said the feeling began on the app about a quarter of the teenagers who reported feeling “not good enough” said it started on Instagram.įacebook’s internal conclusions echo a number of studies that implicate social media in an epidemic of mental health problems among young people. ![]() “Aspects of Instagram exacerbate each other to create a perfect storm,” said one internal report, which said pressure to share only the best moments and to look perfect could pitch teenagers into depression, low self-esteem and eating disorders.Īmong the most concerning findings was that among users who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% in the UK and 6% in the US traced them back to Instagram. In a “mental health deep dive”, marketing and product design executives and data scientists at Facebook concluded that some of the problems, such as “social comparison”, were specific to Instagram and not replicated by other platforms. In May, Adam Mosseri, who is in charge at Instagram, said he had seen research suggesting its effects on teenagers’ mental health was probably “quite small”. And yet, in public, executives at Facebook, which has owned Instagram since 2012, have consistently downplayed its negative impact on teenagers.Īs recently as March, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, claimed social media was more likely to have positive mental health effects. Comprised of findings from focus groups, online surveys and diary studies in 20, the Instagram research shows for the first time how aware the company is of its product’s impact on the mental health of teenagers. ![]()
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