When Frances Haugen, a former product manager at Facebook, told a Senate hearing this week that the company put its “astronomical profits before people”, the outcry was loud and indignant. The social media company’s founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, responded with a Facebook post insisting, “We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health”.
But the whistle-blower was citing the company’s own research, which among other things found that, based on surveys, “Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse”, as The Wall Street Journal reported. (Ms. Haugen provided internal documents to The Journal from Facebook, which owns Instagram.)
What exactly are we talking about here? Say you’re a 13-year-old girl who is beginning to feel anxious about your appearance, who has followed some diet influencers online. Instagram’s algorithm might suggest more extreme dieting accounts with names such as “Eternally starved”, “I have to be thin” and “I want to be perfect”.
In an interview with “60 Minutes”, Ms. Haugen called this “tragic”. “As these young women begin to consume this eating disorder content, they get more and more depressed”, she said. “It actually makes them use the app more. And so they end up in this feedback cycle where they hate their bodies more and more”.
Anyone who has ever spent time as a teenage girl is unlikely to find any of these revelations particularly surprising. Facebook and Instagram are simply carrying on a longstanding American tradition: stoking the insecurities of teenage girls to cash in on them.
There’s plenty of cash at stake here. The global beauty industry generates $500 billion in annual sales, and social media is now an important driver, especially for the youngest target demographic, Gen Z. The global weight management market was estimated at more than $260 billion in 2020, and is projected to grow to more than $400 billion by 2027.
For girls in America, taking in content that seems intended to make you hate your body is an adolescent rite of passage. The medium changes but the ritual stays the same. Before American girls’ confidence was commodified by Instagram, it was at the whim of magazines filled with impossibly slender, airbrushed models and ads from industries relying on girls and women for revenue. At the core of this marketing, the message endures: You are riddled with flaws and imperfections. We will tell you what to buy, and what do, to fix yourself.
It’s scary how much these messages can stick with you. I haven’t been a teenager for nearly two decades, but I vividly remember the advice in the teen magazines I brought home from the library and studied like my textbooks: Celery is “negative calories” (whatever that means). If you succumb to dessert, for the love of God, make it fat-free. I read once that if I was still hungry, I might try eating ice. I can still look at a plate of food and instantly assign it a number of calories in my mind.
The advice of how to look and be your best often came dressed up in language of empowerment — and it wasn’t wrong about what it took to succeed in a sexist, appearances-driven society. If magazines left girls with the distinct impression that our bodies and faces were being constantly appraised, assessed and compared, that impression was confirmed by our experiences in the world.
Mark Zuckerberg participated in the ritual of ranking girls too. When he was experimenting before building Facebook, as a student at Harvard, he put his female classmates’ photos on his now-notorious “Facemash” website, where students could rank and compare the students’ headshots based on how hot they were. He wrote at the time, “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive”.
For girls now, things have changed. They’re largely worse. Social media platforms such as Instagram feel like algorithmic free-for-alls, full of images of people who have altered how they look, whether by using online filters or in real life, with dieting, surgery or both. In the feed, influencers’ and celebrities’ photos are interspersed with photos of your friends and yourself. Now any photo is subject to scrutiny, comparison and assessment in the form of likes and comments.
To some extent, the way these dynamics play out on Instagram is just a natural extension of how girls are treated in our culture anyway. The body positivity movement may have helped, but girls still internalize the message that part of their success in life will rest upon their ability to be admired for their appearance. Instagram measures and gamifies that — creating a virtual high school cafeteria as global as the “explore” button, one that’s peopled by countless unreal bodies. (Adults aren’t exempt — they are more likely to consider plastic surgery if they frequently use image-heavy social media platforms like Instagram.)
Many of these messages are conveyed under the guise of health or wellness, but Facebook’s leaked research suggests that this charade does less to promote health than to damage it. No school health class or parental reassurance is a match for the might of these powerful tech platforms, combined with entire industries that prey on girls’ insecurities. Girls themselves often know Instagram is not good for them, but they keep coming back.
That’s because social media is addictive. Writing in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson called it “attention alcohol”, explaining, “Like booze, social media seems to offer an intoxicating cocktail of dopamine, disorientation, and, for some, dependency”. We are supposed to protect minors from products like this, not dish it out.
For his part, Mr. Zuckerberg isn’t ranking girls in public anymore. Instead, he is the father of daughters. Citing his perspective as a parent, Mr. Zuckerberg pledged in his Facebook post his commitment to continuing to research and prioritize the welfare of children, framing their exposure to his products as inevitable. “The reality is that young people use technology”, he wrote. “Rather than ignoring this, technology companies should build experiences that meet their needs while also keeping them safe”.
But more telling than what Silicon Valley parents say is what they do. Many of them have long known that technology can be harmful: That’s why they’ve often banned their own children from using it.
Ultimately, Instagram is just a vicious messenger. But the cesspool of content fueling it? That comes from us.
Lindsay Crouse is a writer and producer in Opinion. She produced the Emmy-nominated Opinion Video series “Equal Play”, which brought widespread reform to women’s sports.