For Teens, Is Instagram a Force for Good or Evil? Yes.

            It was hour three on the bus leaving Kent School for vacation, and the students’ chatter and excitement had faded, replaced with drowsiness and fatigue. Though her eyes were barely open, Abbey Taylor could not stop herself from scrolling through Instagram. When she came across a recent post from her lifelong friend, Charlotte, it suddenly occurred to her that Charlotte had not interacted with her Instagram content for a while.
            The girls had been friends since the age of three and, along with living in the same neighborhood and spending time together almost every day, they had attended the same schools until Abbey went to a New England boarding school. Naturally, Abbey considered Charlotte her best friend.
            Three years later, she found her name missing on Charlotte’s following list. After the initial disbelief and a brief attempt at apathy, Abbey was swallowed by anxiety, self-doubt, and pain. She cried, ate, and binge-watched excessively for weeks, but when Abbey finally mustered the courage to confront her friend, her friend’s reaction was the final blow. Charlotte told Abbey that the unfollow was “nothing personal.” Infuriated, Abbey unfollowed Charlotte. For Abbey, the friendship was over.
Abbey is not the only teenager who highly values social media interactions and has experienced the overwhelming emotions they can prompt. In the digital age, the rise of social media has impacted the adolescent mind and the very way in which relationships work and are perceived.
            As one of the biggest social networking services worldwide, Instagram is especially popular among teenagers. According to a fall 2020 survey by the Statista Research Department, Instagram ranked third in terms of preferred social networks among American teens. The photo and video-sharing application was launched in 2010, and Facebook, now Meta, purchased it for $1 billion in 2012.
In recent years, Instagram has become an important venue for interaction among adolescents. Many teens use Instagram to organize their social lives, often blurring the lines between offline and online experiences.
            Perhaps this blending of reality and the digital world, with social media’s continued evolution, has changed teen friendships. According to Abbey, “friendship is characterized by a mutual follow on Instagram, while an unfollow is a one-sided friendship breakup.” In this sense, teen friendships may have become transactional.
As a result, unfollows on social media, especially by supposed friends, can hurt and provoke a sense of rejection. Though it is not uncommon for friendships to fade, Instagram can highlight the situation and amplify the resulting negative feelings. When faced with these magnified emotions, teens cope in various ways. For Abbey, who developed mild anxiety and “began to feel worthless,” this meant deleting her Instagram account and app.
            “I have become unhealthily obsessed with ‘who unfollowed me on Instagram,’ so I wanted to take a break,” she explained. “I’m not sure if the deletions will solve the core of the issue, but I think I feel a lot happier now with that pressure gone.”
            The hazards of Instagram aren’t just limited to its follow button. Instagram consists of many metrics, including following, follower, like, comment, and view counts. Among some teens, these metrics have become somewhat of a social life scoreboard. 
Instagram metrics signal a teen’s popularity and social status faster than ever – immediately. With the desire to be popular reaching its zenith in adolescence, teens naturally react to this quantified popularity with waves of anxiety and a need for control. Thus, some teens carefully build and curate their social image on Instagram. 
            As Ariel Kifah, a high school sophomore at the Overlake School in Redmond, Washington, explained, “It’s for sure unsettling that people immediately know how popular you are when they see your profile page, but there are ways to cope with that.” 
            She has carefully monitored who unfollows her using a third-party app, which updates her about recent changes to her account’s followers. Though she is aware the app is against Instagram’s policy, she has used it to “appear more popular by keeping [her] follower to following ratio around one.” Ariel thinks having a small follower-to-following count can appear pathetic, as that shows the individual’s friendships are unreciprocated.
            Ariel also noted that many of her peers obsess over the numbers, especially follower count: she often overhears peers commenting on each other’s metrics when exchanging their Instagram accounts. From Ariel’s perspective, the obsession can be unhealthy. Indeed, these numerical characterizations of popularity and friendship can fuel social comparisons and popularity contests.
            Sophia Pullman is a freshman at The University of Virginia. She uses the popular follow-unfollow method to increase her followers and decrease her following count, thus reaching her desired follower to following ratio. She explained that the method is following many accounts and unfollowing them a few days later whether they follow back or not.
            For Sophia, competition is the driving factor. Frequently comparing her Instagram metrics to those of her friends, she feels pressure to maintain her lead in popularity on the platform. “I can see my friends’ follower counts and like counts trailing right behind me, and that can be a little scary,” she said. Sophia, whose phone screen time on Instagram consistently rose above six hours on school days, has struggled to fall asleep at night and manage her time for academics effectively. For the past semester, her grade has slipped below a C average, leading her to sink deeper into the digital world. As Sophia noted, “It was the snowball effect.” 
            Ultimately, competition, popularity, and relationships are rooted in the brain, in mentality and perception. To some extent, social media may have impacted teens’ perception of validation, worth, and happiness; Instagram’s quantifying of popularity and friendship can lead teens to draw their validation and self-worth from Instagram metrics, instead of from internal sources. Such derivations are not always healthy for adolescent mental health.  
            Recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook’s “own in-depth research shows a significant teen mental-health issue that Facebook plays down in public.” Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen had leaked internal Facebook documents to The Wall Street Journal.
            She revealed her identity on “60 Minutes” and then testified before a Senate subcommittee that Facebook had purposely concealed research showing its products are harming teens’ mental health, especially that of teen girls. One internal Facebook presentation showed that among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the issue to Instagram. 
Shaken by Haugen’s testimony and the leaked documents that ignited a firestorm of criticism from lawmakers, regulators, and the public, Facebook fired back and issued a statement calling the series full of “deliberate mischaracterizations.” Penned by Nick Clegg, the company’s vice president of global affairs, the statement addressed the interpretations of leaked material as taken out of context and “simply not accurate.”
            “The truth is that research into the impact social media has on people is still relatively nascent and evolving, and social media itself is changing rapidly,” wrote Clegg. Some researchers, he noted, argue that more evidence is needed to understand social media’s impact on people so “no single study is going to be conclusive.” 
            According to Laurence Steinberg, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Temple University, it is unwise to assume that the Facebook research is reliable. He warned against excessive reliance on correlational research that links social media use to reports of negative or positive well-being in general.
            He also cited several shortcomings of the Facebook research, such as the absence of a comparison group, lack of controls, and its reliance on self-reporting. These tenets of trustworthy research are crucial parts of any study from which it is possible to draw definitive conclusions, he noted. “Any correlation between depression and Instagram use in the Facebook research could be due to the fact that depressed people use Instagram to make themselves feel better. As we know, correlation isn’t causation,” Dr. Steinberg stated. “We need a lot more good research on the subject before jumping to conclusions.”
            Dr. Steinberg characterized the rush to jump to conclusions as the result of the widespread eagerness to condemn social media. He believes that though it is understandable to want to blame Instagram for causing teenagers’ mental health to suffer, the position is unjustified. According to Dr. Steinberg, “the better studies” have found extremely small effects of social media use on adolescent mental health. He feels that it is important to remember that social media may benefit more adolescents than it hurts.
            Given that much of the discourse surrounding Instagram is negative, it can be easy to forget that Instagram can be a force for good. Teens more supportive of Instagram argued that while Instagram may be correlated to negative mental health, it can also serve as a generally positive platform, and they pointed out several benefits.
            Matthew Johnson, a senior at Wayland High School, in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, thinks Instagram can provide an important dynamic for adolescents. He argued that Instagram is making teens “more receptive to social justice issues” and giving “momentum to protest movements.” In particular, he noted the momentum Instagram provided for the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM).
            “When I saw that almost everyone was posting protest photos and black squares on Instagram back in the summer, I was moved at the demonstration of support from other ethnic groups, as an African American myself,” Matthew said. “The Instagram Blackout was very powerful and inspiring.” From Matthew’s perspective, as demonstrated by BLM, Instagram may be pushing teens to engage in widespread conversations about social justice issues and can be “a tool to educate and amplify voices.”
            Besides promoting social activism and change, some feel that Instagram is crucial for communicating and connecting with others. Leonardo Chen, a high school senior at Cate School in Carpinteria, just outside of Santa Barbara, believes Instagram and other social media have taken on an increasingly important role for the younger generation during the pandemic, especially last year, when “schools were doing online learning.” On Instagram, not only can teens keep up with friends by viewing their posts and stories, but they can also interact by liking or commenting on posts or reacting to stories, he noted specifically.  As Leonardo put it, these elements provide “less deliberate and energy-requiring alternatives” to socializing and can make doing so more convenient.  
            Elizabeth Diamond, who majored in psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has worked at an adolescent mental health service in Washing D.C., offered a potential explanation for the difference in opinion and inconclusiveness of research on Instagram’s effect on adolescent mental health. “Though Instagram highlights pre-existing conditions, like peer pressure and competition, it is not the cause of them. But rather, as a social media platform, Instagram reflects these issues,” she stated. “For this reason, Instagram’s effect itself on adolescent mental health may not be clear yet.”
            She also noted that many still hold strong opinions on the topic, because “an individual’s personal encounters and experiences with Instagram play a significant role in shaping their perspectives.” She believes that people shouldn’t be too quick to blame Instagram, as the content posted on the platform, the individualistic reaction and judgment, and other factors also come into play.
Back at the University of Virginia, Sophia Pullman is doing her best to abstain from social comparisons and from deriving validation from Instagram metrics under the guidance of a mental health counselor.
            “Whether or not Instagram actually harms teens’ mental health, I think it’s most important for teens to be mindful of and take care of their own actions, reactions, and ultimately, well-being,” she reflected. She feels that while it is great if Instagram eliminates its stress sources, such as releasing the option to hide the number of likes on posts in May 2021, societal pressure will always exist, whether on Instagram, in real life, or elsewhere.
            Indeed, whether the problem is Instagram or not, societal pressures have always existed. Throughout the ages, the symbols and sources of adolescent troubles have evolved to meet the age, and social media is the modern example. But in the end, adolescents will have to face societal pressure in one form or the other. 
            Perhaps the controversy of Instagram’s impact on teens is at its heart revolved around the question of how to help teens live better online and in general – to cope with comparison, to accept one’s intrinsic self-worth, and to connect with others in a thoughtful way.