Summary
- Meta’s internal study revealed that Instagram exposes teenagers who are dissatisfied with their bodies to content about appearance and eating disorders.
- According to the analysis, these young people receive up to three times more this type of content, and automatic tools fail to detect 98.5% of the material.
- Meta claims to have reduced the viewing of age-restricted content for teenagers by 50% since July.
Teenagers who feel bad about their bodies after using Instagram are exposed much more frequently to content about eating disorders. This is what an internal study by Meta, obtained by Reuters and confirmed by a company spokesperson.
These young people see around three times more posts about bodies, extreme diets and physical comparisons than other users. According to the analysis, the most affected teenagers receive a greater volume of posts with themes considered “mature” — such as suffering, risky behavior and violence.
What did the research find?
Meta interviewed 1,149 teens throughout the 2023-2024 school year, looking at how often they reported feeling bad about their bodies after using Instagram. Researchers then manually examined the content displayed to these users over three months.
Among the 223 young people who said they often felt dissatisfied with their appearance after surfing the internet, 10.5% of the posts seen were related to eating disorders or body dissatisfaction. Among other teenagers, this type of content represented only 3.3% of the total.
In the study, the authors write that “teens who reported frequent body dissatisfaction after viewing Instagram posts viewed about three times more body-focused/eating disorder-related content than other teens.”
The researchers also observed that these young people had more constant contact with provocative content classified by Meta itself as “adult themes”, “risky behavior”, “suffering” and “cruelty”. In the affected group, these categories accounted for 27% of the feed, compared to 13.6% among the other participants.
Sensitive content is not detected on Instagram
Despite the associations identified, the study does not claim that Instagram directly causes body dissatisfaction. “It is not possible to establish the causal direction of these findings,” the authors wrote, acknowledging the possibility that teens who already feel unwell may seek out more of this type of content.
Even so, Meta’s own researchers warned of the potential for harm. The document revealed flaws in the platform’s current screening systems: 98.5% of sensitive content considered inappropriate for minors was not detected by the company’s automatic tools.
The report indicates that Instagram exposes teenagers to high levels of content that the company’s own consultants recommend limiting. Examples include posts classified as sensitive, including images of extremely thin women in underwear, videos of fights and even drawings of figures crying with phrases such as “how could I compare?” and “make it all end”.
In response, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the study demonstrates the company’s commitment to understanding and improving its platforms. “This research is further proof that we remain committed to understanding young people’s experiences and using these insights to build safer, teen-friendly platforms,” he told Reuters.
Despite not violating Meta’s rules, the researchers themselves inserted a sensitivity warning into the study. The platform claims that, since July, it has halved the display of age-restricted content for teenagers on Instagram.
Source: https://tecnoblog.net/noticias/meta-o-instagram-mostra-mais-conteudo-nocivo-a-adolescentes-vulneraveis/
