Haugen laid responsibility for the company's profits-over-safety strategy right at the top, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg, but she also expressed empathy for Facebook's dilemma.
Haugen's accusations were buttressed by tens of thousands of pages of internal research documents she secretly copied before leaving her job in the company's civic integrity unit.īut she also offered thoughtful ideas about how Facebook's social media platforms could be made safer. She accused the company of failing to make changes to Instagram after internal research showed apparent harm to some teens and being dishonest in its public fight against hate and misinformation. Haugen told lawmakers that stricter government oversight could help mitigate the dangers posed by the social network - from harming children to inciting political violence to fueling misinformation. Last month, a company whistleblower leaked documents to The Wall Street Journal which showed that Facebook executives were aware of the potential harm that prolonged exposure to Instagram was causing young girls.ĭespite internal company research, Instagram continued to add beauty-editing filters that experts say exacerbated body image-related insecurities, even putting young girls at increased risk of suicide.įacebook has been accused of failing to heed warnings from its own engineers that Instagram made young teen girls feel worse about their own bodiesĮarlier this month, the whistleblower who turned out to be the source of the documents obtained by the Journal testified before Congress.įrances Haugen, a data scientist who says she left the company in disgust, accused her former bosses of putting profits over safety.
In an apparent attempt to crack down on the proliferation of images that could exacerbate eating disorders, Instagram has attached disclaimers and warnings of potential content that could be deemed problematic. 'We’re also exploring ways to prevent people from rabbit-holing on one type of content by nudging them to diversify what they’re looking at if they’ve been scrolling on the same topic for a while.' 'The purpose of this analysis was to look for areas where we can improve, and we responded to the gaps we found by making changes to Search to make it harder for people to find accounts that share eating disorder-related content. One who suffers from anorexia might see a model’s cheekbones and seek to lose even more weight in order to mimic the body type.Ī spokesperson for Instagram's parent company, Facebook, told : 'We want Instagram to be a supportive place for people struggling with eating disorders and body image issues, especially young women and girls, and we've worked with experts like the National Eating Disorders Association for years to build policies and features to help where we can. She said those with eating disorders are especially susceptible to images of models. Vazzana said that 99 percent of her patients reported that their conditions were in some way affected by prolonged exposure to social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Vazzana, a psychologist at New York University's Langone Health system who has worked with eating disorder patients. 'Even people with anorexia nervosa can identify that a person is too thin - but there still can be some element of that image that's appealing to them,' said Dr. The idea behind ‘thinspo’ is to motivate young girls and women to lose even more weight or to stay thin. In online lingo, ‘thinspiration’ is a combination of the words ‘thin’ and ‘inspiration.’
One disclaimer offers users support before being shown posts that could be harmful to their conditions Teens are especially vulnerable to what’s known as ‘thinspo’ - which is short for ‘thinspiration.’ Some of the account names include ‘_skinandbones_’, ‘applecoreanorexic,’ and ‘skinny._.binge.’Įxperts in eating disorders say that it is unhealthy for young girls and women who suffer from anorexia and bulimia to be exposed to images of those with similar afflictions since it would reinforce body-related insecurities. Instagram researchers this year conducted an experiment in which they typed in terms like #skinny and #thin are then offered to browse through other accounts that feature dangerously emaciated women and girls.
Internal documents leaked to the New York Post revealed that Instagram’s algorithm curates options based on searches and preferences of users who express interest in dieting, weight loss, and thinness. Instagram bombards women and girls who suffer from eating disorders with images and videos of exceedingly thin females and others afflicted with anorexia, according to research done by the app’s parent company Facebook.