“It is not accurate to say that Instagram is toxic to teenage girls”: so Facebook responded to the investigation published two weeks ago by the Wall Street Journal, which revealed 3 years of confidential research from the Menlo Park company on the impact of social media images on users’ well-being.
The newspaper had told him negative psychological effects (such as anxieties, insecurities and negative thoughts about one’s body) emerged from the data collected and then disseminated on an internal chat of one of the Internet giants.
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A report that, however, misinterpreted the contents of that research, now say the leaders of Facebook, also in view of a hearing in the US Senate, scheduled for Thursday: Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, will have to reply to the various critical points highlighted by the Wall Street Journal in front of the Commerce subcommittee, also providing some more details on the plan of a new Instagram for Kids dedicated to children. According to the company, the research actually showed that many of the teenagers they spoke to think that “using Instagram helps them when they have to deal with those tough times and problems that teenagers usually struggle with,” reads. an article published in the Newsroom section of the Facebook site. “In fact, in 11 of the 12 areas featured on the slides mentioned by the Journal, including sensitive ones like loneliness, anxiety, sadness and eating disorders, many teenagers, who said they had a hard time with these issues, also added that Instagram made them. complicated moments better instead of worse “, underlined Pratiti Raychoudhury, vice president and head of research, who signed the post.
More specifically, the author of the article pointed out that the body image was the only area where Instagram has aggravated problems already felt by young people compared to the other 11 areas. But he also specified that the majority of teenagers who have had difficulties of this type still argued that Instagram had no impact on their situation or made it better: “Among those girls who have explained that they have problems with the image of the their body, 22% said Instagram made them feel better about this aspect and 45.5% said Instagram didn’t make an impact, neither positive nor negative “.
A decidedly different version of that told by the American newspaper on the basis of internal documents to the company: the Wall Street Journal had illustrated some results that had emerged from Facebook studies, such as the fact that “32% of teenagers say that when they have negative thoughts about their body, Instagram makes them feel worse”; or that “the comparisons that take place on Instagram can change the way young women see and describe themselves“; or that “kids blame Instagram for the increase in the rate of anxiety and depression.”
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Facebook not only criticized the reading of the data made by the newspaper, describing it as “inaccurate”, he also pointed out that some of the findings are based on focus groups made up of a sample of just 40 Instagram teenagers in the UK and the US, who have struggled with issues such as body image, self-esteem or one negative mood. Furthermore, this research “does not measure the causal relationship between Instagram and these problems”, added Raychoudhury, underlining that the documents the newspaper came into possession of were made for people who “understand the limitations of this study.”
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