MENLO PARK: The Wall Street Journal Wednesday shared harrowing revelations about the photosharing platform Instagram that is affecting the mental health of teenage girls which even led to suicidal thoughts while parent company Facebook has allegedly kept research secret for around two years.
The report of New York-based daily quoting information from a leaked PowerPoint presentation cited that around 32 percent of teen girls admitted feeling bad about their bodies, as the Facebook-owned social media platform made them ‘feel worse’.
Furthermore, the younger social media users also tend to blame Instagram usage for mental disorders including anxiety and depression. Shockingly, it revealed that around 13 percent of users in the UK and six percent of American users connected their desire to end their lives to the use of the social site.
A different study revealed that around 40 percent of Instagram users reported feeling ‘unattractive’ saying they started feeling this way after using the photo-sharing app and around 25 percent said they don’t feel ‘not good enough’.
Meanwhile, the report claimed that the parent company owned by Mark Zuckerberg is fully aware of the side effects and it has purportedly kept internal research secret for around a considerable time.
Onwards from 2019, the staff of the US-based company is finding the impacts of their platform on its younger users and it has found it harmful for an outsized proportion, mainly girls who are in their teenage.
Many of the development also raised questions on Facebook and sister companies, as Mark Zuckerberg, earlier this year, mentioned positive mental health effects of using social media while Instagram senior official Adam Mosseri termed the effects on teenagers’ mental health as ‘quite small’.
The internal findings of Facebook also included different studies that highlighted the epidemic of mental health problems among social media users.
Earlier, a British mental health charity for children referred to Instagram as the platform which has the most negative impact on the mental wellbeing of social networks users especially the younger ones.
On the other hand, the social giant has declined to comment on the matter when a leading publication approached them and the head of public policy of Instagram termed WSJ report as deceptive as “it focused on a limited set of findings present them unconstructively”.
The social platform while defending itself against the report said to limit posts that promote myths about ‘perfect’ bodies.
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