Instagram making people miserable?
The ‘perfect’ image of life and happiness it promotes is precisely the problem
Should everyone just stop scrolling? When fashion blogger Scarlett Dixon, 24, posted a picture of herself having breakfast, the internet turned nasty. “The best of days start with a smile and positive thoughts. And pancakes. And strawberries. And bottomless tea,” Dixon wrote on her @ scarlettlondon Instagram feed, under an image of her looking flawless on a freshly made bed, flanked by heart-shaped helium balloons.
The sponsored post — for a brand of mouthwash, visible on the side of the shot — was swiftly reposted on Twitter.
“Instagram is a ridiculous lie factory made to make us all feel inadequate,” wrote one angry tweet. The post, which has garnered more than 111,000 ‘likes’ [22 times as many as Dixon’s original] and almost 25,000 retweets, prompted a wave of criticism, with the more printable comments ranging from “Fakelife!” to “Who keeps [mouthwash] on their bedside table? Serial killers, that’s who.”
That hostility feels par for the course on Twitter. The social network is a notorious hotbed of abusive strangers hurling abuse at other abusive strangers, who then all occasionally come together to bully a celebrity off the internet over some minor failing.
Instagram, by contrast, looks like the friendliest social network imaginable. It’s a visually led community where the primary method of interaction is double-tapping an image to like it, where posts that go viral tend to do so because of positivity rather than outrage and where many of the biggest accounts are famous dogs and cats. What’s not to like about Instagram?
But, for a growing number of users — and mental health experts — the very positivity of Instagram is precisely the problem. The site encourages its users to present an upbeat, attractive image that others may find at best misleading and at worse harmful.
In the days following her initial Instagram post, Dixon pointed out the irony that this fear — that the unreality of social media is harming people — was itself being used to justify the thousands attacking her.
In Venice, with an ice-cream
“Each time I refresh my page, hundreds of new nasty messages pour on to my Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, some of which have contained malicious death threats,” she wrote in a follow-up Instagram post, accompanying a picture of her in Venice with an ice-cream. “There are now hundreds of thousands of tweets circling the internet, shaming me.
“My feed isn’t a place of reality,” Dixon added. “I mean, who spends their time in such a beautiful city, perched on a ledge, ice-cream in hand and smile permanently affixed to her face? It’s staged, guys.
“I personally don’t think my content is harmful to young girls, but I do agree Instagram can present a false expectation for people to live up to.”
But whether or not Dixon’s feed is harmful, there is grow-
My feed isn’t a place of reality, though I personally don’t think my content is harmful to young girls. Yet, I do agree Instagram can present a false expectation.” Scarlett Dixon | Fashion blogger
The new algorithm [at Instagram] creates a popularity contest between creators, so that they resort to unethical business decisions.” Victoria Hui | Lust Listt blog
ing support for the idea that Instagram isn’t great for its users’ mental health.
In 2017, the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH), an independent charity that seeks to improve people’s well-being, conducted a United Kingdomwide survey of 14- to 24-yearolds, asking them about the big five social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram. Users ranked how their use of the platforms affected everything — from the quality of their sleep to their ‘fomo’ (“fear of missing out” on what others are enjoying).
Instagram came last, scoring particularly badly for its effects on sleep, body image and fomo. Only Snapchat came close in its overall negativity, saved by a more positive effect on realworld relationships, while YouTube scored positively on almost every metric — except its effect on sleep: it was the worst of all the platforms.
Sparking a backlash
Instagram has always been about looking flawless. What has changed to spark such a backlash? Among users I spoke to, one event was cited time and again: the introduction, in mid2016, of Instagram’s algorithmic timeline. It was one of the largest changes to the platform since it was bought by Facebook in 2012. Rather than presenting users with a cross-section of what the people they were following were up to at any given moment, Instagram began populating feeds with the most noteworthy posts from those accounts.
Victoria Hui, who runs the lifestyle blog the Lust Listt, says: “The new algorithm creates a popularity contest between creators, so that they resort to unethical business decisions in order to keep themselves at the top of the food chain.”
Unscrupulous creators started buying followers, ‘likes’ and comments in an attempt to fool the algorithm; as Instagram clamped down on that, Hui says, those users formed secret “comment pods” conspiring to share “each and every post with each other in order to generate ‘authentic’ and immediate engagement”.
While influencers such as Dixon often get the lion’s share of the blame for the epidemic of unreality on Instagram, it’s just as prevalent at the grassroots as among the “Insta-celebrities”.