Facebook's Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Much more than for boys, adolescence typically heightens girls’ self-consciousness about their changing body and amplifies insecurities about where they fit in their social network. Social media—particularly Instagram, which displaces other forms of interaction among teens, puts the size of their friend group on public display, and subjects their physical appearance to the hard metrics of likes and comment counts—takes the worst parts of middle school and glossy women’s magazines and intensifies them.
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The toxicity comes from the very nature of a platform that girls use to post photographs of themselves and await the public judgments of others.
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imilar increases occurred at the same time for girls in Canada for mood disorders and for self-harm. Girls in the U.K. also experienced very large increases in anxiety, depression, and self-harm (with much smaller increases for boys).
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Some have argued that these increases reflect nothing more than Gen Z’s increased willingness to disclose their mental-health problems. But researchers have found corresponding increases in measurable behaviors such as suicide (for both sexes), and emergency-department admissions for self-harm (for girls only). From 2010 to 2014, rates of hospital admission for self-harm did not increase at all for women in their early 20s, or for boys or young men, but they doubled for girls ages 10 to 14.
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The available evidence suggests that Facebook’s products have probably harmed millions of girls. If public officials want to make that case, it could go like this:
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National surveys of American high-school students show that only about 63 percent reported using a “social networking site” on a daily basis back in 2010.
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But as smartphone ownership increased, access became easier and visits became more frequent. By 2014, 80 percent of high-school students said they used a social-media platform on a daily basis, and 24 percent said that they were online “almost constantly.”
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Notably, girls became much heavier users of the new visually oriented platforms, primarily Instagram (which by 2013 had more than 100 million users), followed by Snapchat, Pinterest, and Tumblr.
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Boys are glued to their screens as well, but they aren’t using social media as much; they spend far more time playing video games. When a Boy steps away from the console, he does not spend the next few hours worrying about what other players are saying about him
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Instagram, in contrast, can loom in a girl’s mind even when the app is not open, driving hours of obsessive thought, worry, and shame.
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In 2017, British researchers asked 1,500 teens to rate how each of the major social-media platforms affected them on certain well-being measures, including anxiety, loneliness, body image, and sleep. Instagram scored as the most harmful, followed by Snapchat and then Facebook.
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Facebook’s own research, leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen, has a similar finding: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression … This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.” The researchers also noted that “social comparison is worse” on Instagram than on rival apps.
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A recent experiment confirmed these observations: Young women were randomly assigned to use Instagram, use Facebook, or play a simple video game for seven minutes. The researchers found that “those who used Instagram, but not Facebook, showed decreased body satisfaction, decreased positive affect, and increased negative affect.”
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Snapchat’s filters “keep the focus on the face,” whereas Instagram “focuses heavily on the body and lifestyle.
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(Boys lost less, and may even have gained, when they took up multiplayer fantasy games, especially those that put them into teams.)
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The subset of studies that allow researchers to isolate social media, and Instagram in particular, show a much stronger relationship with poor mental health. The same goes for those that zoom in on girls rather than all teens.
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In a 2019 internal essay, Andrew Bosworth, a longtime company executive, wrote:While Facebook may not be nicotine I think it is probably like sugar. Sugar is delicious and for most of us there is a special place for it in our lives. But like all things it benefits from moderation.
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Bosworth was proposing what medical researchers call a “dose-response relationship.” Sugar, salt, alcohol, and many other substances that are dangerous in large doses are harmless in small ones.
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his framing also implies that any health problems caused by social media result from the user’s lack of self-control. That’s exactly what Bosworth concluded: “Each of us must take responsibility for ourselves.” The dose-response frame also points to cheap solutions that pose no threat to its business model. The company can simply offer more tools to help Instagram and Facebook users limit their consumption.
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social-media platforms are not like sugar. They don’t just affect the individuals who overindulge. Rather, when teens went from texting their close friends on flip phones in 2010 to posting carefully curated photographs and awaiting comments and likes by 2014, the change rewired everyone’s social life.
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Improvements in technology generally help friends connect, but the move onto social-media platforms also made it easier—indeed, almost obligatory––for users to perform for one another.
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Public performance is risky. Private conversation is far more playful. A bad joke or poorly chosen word among friends elicits groans, or perhaps a rebuke and a chance to apologize. Getting repeated feedback in a low-stakes environment is one of the main ways that play builds social skills, physical skills, and the ability to properly judge risk. Play also strengthens friendships.
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First, Congress should pass legislation compelling Facebook, Instagram, and all other social-media platforms to allow academic researchers access to their data. One such bill is the Platform Transparency and Accountability Act, proposed by the Stanford University researcher Nate Persily.
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The wrong photo can lead to school-wide or even national infamy, cyberbullying from strangers, and a permanent scarlet letter
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Performative social media also puts girls into a trap: Those who choose not to play the game are cut off from their classmates
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Instagram and, more recently, TikTok have become wired into the way teens interact, much as the telephone became essential to past generations.
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f those platforms. Without a proper control group, we can’t be certain that the experiment has been a catastrophic failure, but it probably has been. Until someone comes up with a more plausible explanation for what has happened to Gen Z girls, the most prudent course of action for regulators, legislators, and parents is to take steps to mitigate the harm.
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Correlation does not prove causation, but nobody has yet found an alternative explanation for the massive, sudden, gendered, multinational deterioration of teen mental health during the period in question.
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Second, Congress should toughen the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. An early version of the legislation proposed 16 as the age at which children should legally be allowed to give away their data and their privacy.
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Unfortunately, e-commerce companies lobbied successfully to have the age of “internet adulthood” set instead at 13. Now, more than two decades later, today’s 13-year-olds are not doing well. Federal law is outdated and inadequate. The age should be raised. More power should be given to parents, less to companies.
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Third, while Americans wait for lawmakers to act, parents can work with local schools to establish a norm: Delay entry to Instagram and other social platforms until high school.
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Right now, families are trapped. I have heard many parents say that they don’t want their children on Instagram, but they allow them to lie about their age and open accounts because, well, that’s what everyone else has done.