In AprIl 2019, the heAd of InstAgrAm took the
stage at Facebook’s annual developer conference to
announce upcoming changes to the massively popu-
lar photo-sharing app. Adam Mosseri revealed that
Instagram (which is owned by Facebook) would be
testing a version of the social-media service that hides
the number of likes a post receives. Only the user who
uploaded the content would see how many people
double-tapped their post. “We don’t want Instagram
to feel like a competition,” Mosseri said at the event.
It was an unprecedented acknowledgment of the
possible mental-health repercussions of chasing fol-
lows and likes. Investing so much time in social media
can increase stress levels through factors like envy
about friends’ experiences, feelings of inadequacy
over having fewer followers than one’s peers, or fear
of exclusion. A 2017 report from the Royal Society
for Public Health in the U.K. found that among al-
most 1,500 teens and young adults, Instagram was the
worst-ranked social-media platform for mental health
and well-being. Though it scored well in terms of self-
expression and self-identity, it was associated with
high levels of anxiety, depression, bullying and fear of
missing out. Twitter was ranked the second-best net-
work in the same survey, surpassed only by YouTube.
However, Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey
has stated that there is room for improvement. “If I
had to start the service again, I would not emphasize
the follower count as much. I would not emphasize
the ‘like’ count as much. I don’t think I would even
create ‘like’ in the first place,” he said at the TED2019
conference earlier this year. Dorsey also pointed to
issues such as abuse, harassment and misinforma-
tion that have become rampant throughout Twitter.
Despite the potentially bleak consequences, how-
ever, social media shows no sign of slowing down: In-
stagram now hosts over a billion users, and Twitter has
roughly 330 million active users each month. “Social
media is obviously one of the most rapidly growing
technologies of all time, if not the most rapidly grow-
ing technology of all time,” says Brian Primack, dean
of the College of Education and Health Professions at
the University of Arkansas. “And it’s not something
that people use just now and then. It’s tremendous
exposure, but it’s also a very emotional exposure.”
Teenagers, according to Pew Research Center’s
2018 report “Teens, Social Media & Technology,”
have mixed views on the impact. The survey found
that 45% of U.S. teens felt social media was neither
positive nor negative, 31% felt it was mostly positive,
and 24% felt it was mostly negative. Other research
has yielded much more consistently negative, and at
times detrimental, effects. “Since 2012, there’s been a
pronounced rise in unhappiness, depression, suicideTHE PERILS
OF SOCIAL
MEDIA
Instagram, Facebook and other
platforms keep us connected, but
they come with an emotional cost