Facebook knows Instagram is improving mental health for teen girls, company documents show
Instagram, the photo and video sharing app owned by Facebook Inc., is improving mental health among teenagers according to internal documents leaked to the Wall Street Journal and reviewed by Deliberatus. The documents back up Facebook’s claim that Instagram delivers on its 1.3 billion users’ expectation for the platform support them when they are having a hard time in their lives.
Instagram’s positive effect on mental health outweighed negative feelings on every experience covered by the report. The largest improvements came from users reporting work or family stress, sadness, loneliness, anxiety and fear of missing out (shortened to FOMO among teens). Even on more challenging issues such as social comparison, body image and problematic use, more users reported Instagram made their well being better than said made it worse.
The data revealed an especially dramatic improvement among teenage boys who were five times more likely to feel better about body issues because of their time on the platform. It helped teenage girls cope with social comparison twice as often as it made the experience worse, while also making them less lonely and less sad.
Facebook’s in-house research team conducted the study of more than 22,000 users “to understand Instagram’s role (for better or worse) in the hard experiences in people’s lives.” But on a consistent basis the research shows the role is for better.
While adults may find Instagram’s breadth of content overwhelming, teenage users find mental health benefits in the app’s core features that connect them with friends and family, share humor, and express themselves as they want the world to see them.
The importance of apps like Instagram is laid bare in further research leaked to the Journal stating 82 percent of teenagers experienced emotional issues in a given month and 20 percent considered suicide or self-harm. The study zeroed in on 13 mental health issues such as body image, social comparison, eating disorders and depression. However, researchers qualified the results only apply to Instagram users who experienced one of these moments in the past 30 days and the instances were self-reported, meaning Facebook’s survey teams did not screen for clinical diagnoses.
Instagram users of all ages reported work, sleep and body image as their most stressful issues on or off the social platform. Nearly 58 percent of teenagers additionally cited social comparison as a leading cause of stress.
Teens in the United States and United Kingdom reported Instagram makes them feel better about themselves in overwhelming percentages compared to those who say it makes them feel worse. Top-two-box results, a common method of grouping survey responses, show teenage girls in both countries say Instagram makes them feel better. When combined with users who report their mental health being unaffected, the percentage of users who say they feel worse after being on the platform drops even further.
The leak comes at a difficult time for Facebook critics who are looking to step up attacks on the world’s largest social networking company. Though some users report the app makes their mental wellbeing worse, experts suggest Congressional efforts to place new regulations on how the platforms’ algorithms rank content will likely stall. Anti-trust efforts by the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice may also be slowed if government is forced to recognize other social networking apps like YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat simply because the research naturally compares them to Instagram.
Of course, the above is hogwash; a fake news article written by Deliberatus to prove this point:
Anti-Facebook hysteria is out of control.
The most recent news cycle is driven by “reporting” from the Wall Street Journal with the incendiary headline “Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for many teen girls, company documents show”. Technically the headline is correct; the documents do show that. Those same documents are also the source for everything I wrote above.
Concrete conclusions only begin to appear when a journalist, pundit, lawmaker or blogger isolates individual numbers and re-assembles them.
How can both be true? Because Deliberatus did the same thing the WSJ did. I picked through complicated data and cited it in a way that led users to the conclusion I wanted them to draw. It’s easy to do with qualitative research on any topic because the data is rarely black-and-white in its native state. Concrete conclusions only begin to appear when a journalist, pundit, lawmaker or blogger isolates individual numbers and re-assembles them. Like the Journal’s article, my post re-assembled them in lazy and dishonest ways. But unlike the paper I’m not a team of reporters I didn’t go find scholars and teens to tell me what I wanted to hear.
If you’re not sure who to believe, read the data for yourself. Ignore Facebook’s annotations on the left side, that’s just its version of what the WSJ and Deliberatus wrote. Go through the slides—it’s dense stuff, so spend time on it if you need to—and decide for yourself what’s true. Deliberatus thinks you’ll find my headline and the Wall Street Journal’s are utterly and completely unhelpful.
Beyond that, the story is an incredible case study in how reporters with agenda can gaslight readers into thinking and believing whatever narrative the writers wish. Let’s go through the article and highlight a few of them.
“About a year ago, teenager Anastasia Vlasova started seeing a therapist. She had developed an eating disorder, and had a clear idea of what led to it: her time on Instagram.
She joined the platform at 13, and eventually was spending three hours a day entranced by the seemingly perfect lives and bodies of the fitness influencers who posted on the app.
“When I went on Instagram, all I saw were images of chiseled bodies, perfect abs and women doing 100 burpees in 10 minutes,” said Ms. Vlasova, now 18, who lives in Reston, Va.
Right off the bat the writers establish the premise based on the experience of one out of 1.3 billion users. This should raise a red flag and put all thinking readers on high alert for what follows. Algorithms learn based on a user’s behavior but the reporters give us no insight into who she followed and interacted with or how she used the app at all other than spending several hours a day in it. Remember what I said about finding people to tell me what I want to hear?
Around that time, researchers inside Instagram, which is owned by Facebook Inc., were studying this kind of experience and asking whether it was part of a broader phenomenon. Their findings confirmed some serious problems.
From there they cherry pick only the information that will backup the assertion that the research “confirmed some serious problems.”
“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the issues.
The same slide shows 45 percent of teen girls say Instagram has no effect and 22 percent say it has a positive effect. The Journal leaves this out until you scroll further and see the graphic. It’s not until the 47th paragraph of the article that the reporters acknowledge in writing “Facebook’s research indicates Instagram’s effects aren’t harmful for all users.”
Since transparency is so vital to the paper, Deliberatus calls on the Wall Street Journal to release its internal data from Google Analytics or other tracking software to tell us what percent of users made it to the 47th paragraph of this story.
Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram, one presentation showed.
Oops. Misread the slide. The Journal cites the data without telling readers it does not include users whose thoughts didn’t originate based on Instagram content. This had the effect of over-stating the data to give users the impression the problem is far more prevalent than it actually is. How could a venerable newspaper make such an error? Most likely by relying on a source who by her own admission to Congress had no experience working on the report or mental health issues at all.
Expanding its base of young users is vital to the company’s more than $100 billion in annual revenue, and it doesn’t want to jeopardize their engagement with the platform.
More than 40% of Instagram’s users are 22 years old and younger, and about 22 million teens log onto Instagram in the U.S. each day, compared with five million teens logging onto Facebook, where young users have been shrinking for a decade, the materials show.
On average, teens in the U.S. spend 50% more time on Instagram than they do on Facebook.
“Instagram is well positioned to resonate and win with young people,” said a researcher’s slide posted internally. Another post said: “There is a path to growth if Instagram can continue their trajectory.”
After manipulating the original data, the reporters now begin to meld their story into a second narrative: That Facebook won’t act to reduce Instagram’s harm to mental health because it might hurt the company’s bottom line. The statement “it doesn’t want to jeopardize their engagement with the platform” is not backed by a single piece of factual reporting in the article. The authors would like you to think it is, so they list statistics about how many users are in their teens and early-20s and how that number is declining. But read carefully. Nothing in the quotes about growth plucked from other leaked documents actually back up the direct claim or its implied meaning. In a profession meant to deal with facts and evidence this should never make it past an editor’s red pen.
Nevertheless, the article persists. Citing five pieces of research Deliberatus can’t find, it makes claims that Instagram is worse about problems like social comparison than other social platforms (which the FTC would dispute are even social platforms at all, but that’s a different deliberation). Given how disingenuous the writers are about the research we can fact check, Deliberatus can’t in honest thinking take any of what comes later in the article as truth. Only those willing to set aside all pretense of critical thinking could make that leap.
Then the article brings in Congress, which always makes for a good time. After demanding answers of Facebook, Senator Richard Blumenthal, chair of the committee on some damn thing, chastises CEO Mark Zuckerberg by saying, “Facebook’s answers were so evasive—failing to even respond to all our questions—that they really raise questions about what Facebook might be hiding.”
Whoa. What kind of heinous answer had Facebook given him that he found it so evasive? Per the Journal, “Facebook also told the senators that its internal research is proprietary and ‘kept confidential to promote frank and open dialogue and brainstorming internally.'”
That’s…it? Corporate confidentiality? A funny thing, that response from the Senator. If he has such a problem with Facebook (or any private business) wanting to keep its internal research out of the public eye, I’m sure he would have no problem releasing the internal communications of his own office. For example, Deliberatus is curious as to the extent the Senator coordinated with Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee who leaked thousands of these internal documents, before she testified to his committee. In fact I call on him to do so under the Freedom of Information Act.
One small problem: Congress is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. So I guess the esteemed Senator is okay with evasiveness when it works in his favor. Back to the article…
Eva Behrens, a 17-year-old student at Redwood High School in Marin County, Calif., said she estimates half the girls in her grade struggle with body-image concerns tied to Instagram. “Every time I feel good about myself, I go over to Instagram, and then it all goes away,” she said.
The Journal doesn’t state this directly, but Deliberatus will assume the student cited here has not conducted research to back up her estimate.
Angela Guarda, director for the eating-disorders program at Johns Hopkins Hospital and an associate professor of psychiatry in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, said it is common for her patients to say they learned from social media tips for how to restrict food intake or purge. She estimates that Instagram and other social-media apps play a role in the disorders of about half her patients.
There’s another unsubstantiated estimate. The reporters are trying to make you think these are valid guesses by citing the subjective experience of a teenage girl (the age group studied by the Facebook research the article already misrepresented) and an academic. This is a common trick to lend credibility where little to none exists in any verifiable fashion.
To perpetuate the implied assertion that Facebook is covering up this data (which again is private internal data gathered by Facebook employees and not subject to any public disclosure laws), the Journal writers relay the impressions of a New York University social psychologist who met with Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram. They close the section with this quote: “It was not suggested to me that they had internal seraph showing a problem.”
Another journalistic trick. We don’t know what research the Journal presented to him. Was it the full scope of data, or was it the Journal’s interpretation of the data as presented in the article? Without that knowledge, readers are left to assume Facebook is engaging in a cover up that would make tobacco companies blush. Just as the writers seem to intend.
More than 2,000 words into this blog post I finally learned the reporters did talk to two Facebook researchers who said “the causality of Facebook’s research was unclear, and noted some of the studies had small sample sizes.” This was the 82nd paragraph of the article.
I will finish the blog on that stunning and damning revelation. Eighty-two paragraphs into the story, long after the vast majority of readers have clicked out, the Wall Street Journal admitted it sat on information that would call the previous 81 paragraphs into question and deliver a serious blow to the accuracy of its eye-popping headline.
The Wall Street Journal’s credibility will not soon recover.
Deliberate on that the next time it, or any other, news outlet tries to make you hysterically upset.