Leaks just exposed how toxic Facebook and Instagram are to teen girls and, well, everyone | Siva Vaidhyanathan | The Guardian
In one piece, the Journal revealed that Facebook maintains a private registry of very important people, including celebrities and politicians, who are exempt from the strict content-posting rules that govern the rest of us.
A second article was even more powerful in its indictment of Facebook and its leadership. The Journal showed that Facebook s own researchers had documented the psychological dangers that Instagram, which Facebook owns, poses to teenagers, especially teen girls.
Here s how Facebook s internal documents and presentations put it: We [Instagram] make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls, and Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression. This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups. Internal studies showed that, among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram.
That’s about the size of it. To be fair, Facebook was venturing into the substructure of our society and “breaking things” that maybe should not have been broken. Bit of a puzzle for us free market types.