Loading playerOn Thursday 18 November, the attorneys general of several US states announced that they had launched an investigation into Meta, the company previously and still today known as Facebook, to ascertain any violations of consumer protection laws regarding the methods used to attract and retain the younger audience on Instagram, while being aware of the physical and mental health harms associated with using the platform for a portion of that audience.
The survey will be conducted by a coalition of at least 11 states, led by both Republican and Democratic governors, including California, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and Nebraska, the New York Times wrote. States will investigate “techniques used by Meta to increase the frequency and duration of youth and young user engagement, and the damage caused by such prolonged involvement,” said Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson.
The joint attorney general's initiative has brought the attention of the US media and public opinion back to one of the issues raised by the most recent Facebook inquiries and information contained in documents released by the “whistleblower” Frances Haugen, a former employee of the company .
Those documents had confirmed Facebook's failures in countering disinformation and incitement to hatred and violence, adding however some new elements regarding the alleged inclination of the company to favor profits at the expense of the introduction of possible measures to counteract the negative effects of platforms on the mental health of younger people, and in particular the negative effects of Instagram on young teenagers.
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Insights and analyzes published after the Facebook Papers by various newspapers and news sites have, on the one hand, supported the urgent need to study with particular attention the effects of social media on younger people and, on the other, invited to distinguish between different aspects of the matter. In particular, several scholars have suggested that any association between certain mental health problems or youth problems and the use of the services offered by Meta and other social network companies should be considered with great caution.
A spokesperson for Meta argues that the investigation is based on a misinterpretation of broader issues that also affect other social media platforms.
What the Facebook Files say about Instagram
The effects of social media and in particular Instagram on the mental health of adolescent people had been the subject of a controversial journalistic investigation published from the Wall Street Journal between September and October, based on internal documents provided to the paper by Haugen. The inquiries were titled “The Facebook Files”.
According to one of the documents consulted by the WSJ, a specific research group of Facebook – which through focus groups, online surveys and daily diaries dealt for 18 months with a series of issues related to the interactions of and users with the platforms – had concluded and disclosed to the company, starting in 2019, that for a significant portion of vulnerable users, Instagram can generate “negative social comparisons” more than other social media, when those people evaluate their value in relation to attractiveness, wealth and success of other people. “People use Instagram because it's a competition. This is the fun part, “objected a manager, now no longer in office, on the sidelines of a presentation by the group, defending the idea of social confrontation.
The group added that on Instagram the filters and content presented through the “Explore” function focus on facial beautification, body images and messages regarding lifestyles and diets more than what happens on apps from rival companies such as TikTok or Snapchat. And that Instagram is able to aggravate problems of conflict with the image of their body in many young girls, helping to favor the onset of eating and other disorders, or to provoke acts of self-harm. “For one out of every three teenage girls, we make body image problems worse,” was written on a slide from a presentation given by the group in 2019.
“32 percent of teenage girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” noted the research group on the internal Facebook wall in March 2020. Another presentation from the group indicated that Among young teenagers who reported suicidal thoughts, 13 per cent of British and 6 per cent of American users found the origin of the desire to kill themselves in Instagram. Like other previous and subsequent investigations on Facebook, the WSJ one on the damaging effects of Instagram on younger users however concluded that an effort by the company to address the problems and try to contain them had been, albeit minimal.
From the information provided by the research group, among other things, the substantial uselessness of Facebook's experimental choice of hiding the like count of Instagram posts to try to reduce the feelings of anxiety and negative feelings among the most adolescent people had also emerged. vulnerable. Nonetheless, the change was finally implemented after, according to the documents, some senior executives suggested to Zuckerberg that that choice would still improve the company's reputation by giving the impression that it was taking care of the problem.
Facebook has not made the results of internal research public, nor available to scholars and lawmakers who have requested them in recent months, and has long been trying to minimize the negative effects of its apps on adolescent people. “The research we have shows that using social apps to connect with other people can have beneficial effects on mental health,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during a congressional question in March 2021.
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On the occasion of the publication of the investigation, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri did not contest the results of internal searches or deny that some Instagram features may be harmful to the mental health of a minority of young users. However, he reduced the actual incidence of the phenomenon by accusing the WSJ of having decontextualized the research of the internal group and neglected other aspects that instead described Instagram as a tool of help for many teenage girls with problems. “It is simply incorrect to argue that this research proves that Instagram is” toxic “to teenage girls,” Meta Pratiti's vice president and head of research Raychoudhury wrote on the company's blog in September.
Mosseri added that social media represent an aspect of modern life capable of producing benefits far outweighing the harm, and that tools and features capable of identifying people in need on Instagram and directing them towards positive content are being studied. . “But we have to be honest and accept that there are compromises. It's not as simple as turning off something and thinking it will get better, because you can often make things worse, unintentionally, “he added.
Meanwhile, at the end of September, Instagram announced that it had suspended plans to introduce a version of the app for children, following concerns that emerged after the publication of the first Facebook Files. As with other social media, people under the age of 13 cannot have an account and use Instagram, although Meta has claimed to know that this ban is in fact widely infringed.
What they think outside Facebook
Some critical analyzes of the content of the Facebook Papers, already known in part from previous surveys in recent years, have offered broader readings to about the problematic interactions of young teens on Instagram. In an article on Atlantic, journalist Derek Thompson first of all placed attention on the fact that according to internal documents consulted by the Wall Street Journal, most of the teenagers said they still considered Instagram a useful and fun medium, despite being aware of the compulsive and depressing aspects.
Thompson then proposed a parallel between social media and another 'fun product that millions of people apparently love; which is harmful in large doses; that it makes a sizable minority feel more anxious, more depressed, and worse about their bodies; and that many people struggle to use in moderation “: alcohol. Like alcohol, Thompson continues, social media offers a mix of short-term euphoria and long-term regrets, and can lead to painful behavior and even addictions for a minority of people.
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The central experiment of a research published last June and funded by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private US organization that deals with economic studies, showed that the use of incentives to reduce the use of social media has lasting effects, suggesting that social media is indeed addictive. And it showed that allowing people to set time limits in front of devices substantially reduces social media usage, suggesting self-control issues at the root of the abuse.
Researchers Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow and researcher Lena Song, authors and author of the NBER publication, concluded that on the basis of the economic model they used, self-control problems, amplified by habit formation, would be responsible for 31 percent of use of social media. Which is to say, writes Thompson commenting on the research, that about one in three minutes spent on social media is time we neither expected to spend on social media nor does it give us feelings of pleasure when we think about it in retrospect.
According to Thompson, the comparison between alcohol and social media is useful in understanding the kind of social infrastructure historically built around alcohol and currently still absent for social media. The need to limit alcohol consumption is strongly present and rooted in our cultures, from the warnings on responsible drinking to organizations dedicated to combating alcohol abuse and addiction. Furthermore, while we have been consuming alcohol for thousands of years and studying its biochemical effects on the human body, social media has been around for less than two decades and we are still trying to understand what effects it has on both individuals and communities.
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The damaging effects of Instagram and social media on adolescent people could also have to do with the mechanics of apps as much as with the particular psychological conditions of a portion of that audience, said Rachel Rodgers, a professor of applied psychology at Northeastern University in Boston. and scholar of socio-cultural influences on body representation and dietary concerns. The predominantly visual nature of social media platforms preferred by younger people tends to give a 'social prize' to looks, and this can be a problem for adolescent people, who are still developing their sense of identity.
“There is no question that there is substantial research showing that these platforms can have a negative effect on young people,” clarified Rodgers. According to her, the main aspect of the apps most used by this type of audience, in addition to the dominant visual component, is interactivity: “one of the objectives of the publication is to obtain feedback”, and “in a conceptualization in which you are valid only for what is your image, that image becomes a reflection d of your value as a person “.
According to Rodgers, some of teen girls' problems with Instagram are not something that can be solved through external intervention on the platforms. And, in general, the responsibilities of the companies owning those apps shouldn't be different from collective ones, nor should they release other people and organizations from the responsibility of making the world a safe, fair and pro-social place. “It applies to apparel and beauty companies, all companies that profit from making people feel that their looks are inadequate. And I think it also applies to us and to others and other users of social networks, it is a social responsibility “.
Cal Newport, a New Yorker collaborator and computer science professor at Georgetown University, Washington, DC also wrote about the concept of social responsibility.According to Newport, many of the comments to the Wall Street Journal inquiries focused on calling for rules and restrictions for platforms. of Meta, and showed some frustration at the fact that long-requested measures had not yet been implemented.
But those reflections lacked a consideration that according to Newport should instead be a rather natural answer to the problem of the damage of Instagram on younger people: asking oneself if it is not appropriate to ban its use to boys and girls. According to Newport, a large part of public opinion and politics that comment on the journalistic inquiries on Facebook, since the time of the Cambridge Analytica case, implicitly accept that the presence of these tools cannot be questioned and that everything that remains from discuss both how they work.
“I'm not entirely sure we should so hastily give up asking ourselves about the need for these technologies in our lives, especially when they impact the well-being of our sons and daughters,” wrote Newport.
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According to Jonathan Haidt, a professor of social psychology at New York University and a highly cited scholar on social media and mental health issues in adolescence, the negative effects of social media are highly concentrated among young people and adolescent girls in particular. , whose rates of depression, anxiety and self-harm in the United States have risen steadily since the early 1910s. “Much more than for boys, adolescence typically increases girls' self-awareness of their changing bodies and amplifies insecurities about where they fit into their social network,” Haidt wrote in Atlantic.
Haidt argues that social media, and Instagram in particular, replace other forms of interaction between teens, showcasing the size of their group of friends, and subjecting their physical appearance to 'likes' and comment count metrics: “It takes the worst of middle school and glossy magazines, and escalates it.” Haidt then cites a study published in 2018 in EClinicalMedicine, a free-access journal published by the scientific journal Lancet, that girls who use social media a lot are about two to three times more likely to say they feel depressed than girls who use them. they use little or not at all.
At the same time, Haidt clarifies the limitations of research attempting to link the rise in mental health problems and the use of social media, when he states that “correlation does not prove causation.” However, he wonders if the data produced by the already numerous researches of recent years are still sufficient to urgently consider the question: “If the Americans do nothing until the researchers can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Instagram and its proprietary company Facebook (now Meta) are harming teenage girls, these platforms may never be held responsible and the damage could continue indefinitely “.
According to Haidt, social media platforms weren't initially designed for teenagers, but that audience has nonetheless become “the subject of a gigantic national experiment that tested the effects of such platforms. Without an adequate control group, we cannot be sure that the experiment was a catastrophic failure, but it probably was “.
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In an article published by the New York Times a few weeks after the Wall Street Journal investigation, Laurence Steinberg, a professor of psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia and a student of adolescent problems, expressed some perplexities and suggested much caution in the analysis of correlations between social media and mental health problems in young people. Research linking those issues to using services like Instagram is still underdeveloped, Steinberg wrote, and we should be careful not to rely too heavily on insights.
Regarding the research of the internal Facebook group, research without control groups and whose methods essentially included interviews and focus groups with Instagram users, Steinberg wrote that “psychological research has repeatedly shown that we often do not understand ourselves as well as we think “, and added that” scientific studies of human behavior try to go beyond the accounts of individuals as to why they feel what they feel or why they behave the way they do “.
Psychologists agree that there has been an increase in depression and related mental health problems among young people in recent years, says Steinberg, and that this trend deserves urgent attention. “But unraveling cause and effect in finding the correlations between experiences and mental health is a huge challenge,” he added.
Although there is a growing scientific literature on the links between social media and mental health among adolescent people, Steinberg writes, it is not yet possible to draw firm conclusions because very few studies present characteristics quite different from those of Facebook's lack of internal research. And the most accredited and scientifically sound studies have found a negative correlation between the use of social media and mental health in adolescent people, but most have found very small effects, even more reduced when compared with other factors that can affect on the onset of mental health problems.
“Blaming Facebook for a teenage person's malaise can become a convenient way to avoid other, more uncomfortable but equally plausible explanations, such as family dysfunction, substance abuse and school-related stress,” concludes Steinberg.
Where to ask for help
If you are in an emergency, call 112 . If you or someone you know has suicidal thoughts, you can call the Friendly Phone at 02 2327 2327 or via the internet from here, every day from 10 to 24.
You can also call the Samaritans association at 06 77208977 , every day from 1pm to 10pm.
