How HVSMs like Instagram — TikTok — Snapchat Can Cause Body Dysmorphia
In September of last year (2021), the Wall Street Journal began to publish some damaging leaks from Facebook (now Meta). These articles took off like wildfire, sparking attention from the “United States of Bloggers” and even caused hearings in Congress.
The evidence showed direct links between Instagram and horrific consequences like eating disorders, body dysmorphia, depression, and even suicide.
Apparently, the company had been researching how their platform affected young girls for 3 years making some startling conclusions:
“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.”
“Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression.”
Young girls said, “when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.”
Yet even after these results were published internally to the company, Mark Zuckerberg made this statement at a congressional hearing:
“The research that we’ve seen is that using social apps to connect with other people can have positive mental health benefits.”
And the hardest part is that what he said is true. But so is the information collected during the internal studies showing that it has extremely detrimental effects.
How could this be? And why has nothing significant changed since last September to try and help the 300 million or more young teens facing worse mental health from Instagram?
Well, that’s what we’re here for right now. We’re going to take a deeper dive into the mechanics behind the way our kid’s brains interact with these visual social media platforms. Because what is abundantly clear is that awareness of the effects coupled with a clear understanding of how social media tries to target us can make a big difference.
The Journal of Mental Health released an article in 2020 where the researcher personally surveyed 8 groups of kids aged 11 to 18. He found that children in those adolescent years were willing to openly talk about their experience with social media. They were very aware of both the positive and negative aspects of social media use because they had experienced it or they knew someone who had gone through it.
Let’s look at what the kids said about social media:
Good — Protects their mental health. Makes them more social. Helps them connect with and communicate with people.
Bad — Overuse. Feel a lack of balance. If they are without their device, they can feel like they are missing out.
Ugly — Cyber-bullying. Trolling. It feels isolating & like no one is willing to help or can help.
But seemingly most important was how the kids felt about the general adult outlook on social media.
Most adults and professionals felt that the time their children spent online should be restricted and that smartphone ownership should have a clear age limit. When adults presume that social media will have a negative effect on their lives - it made the children feel sad and fearful.
It’s not right to just leave it up to chance, though. And by now it’s clear that Meta, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and the like won’t make fundamental investments in protecting kids. It’s much more in line with their business model to keep people engaged at any cost for as long as possible. That’s why we, as parents, need to understand what’s happening to our children when they’re on these platforms. We need to be able to teach them how to handle new things and show empathy and understanding to what they might be going through.
When you open up Instagram, the first thing you see is a feed full of images. On TikTok, it’s a feed full of videos. And the algorithms that recommend content all strive for engagement. Images or videos that can stop someone from continuing to scroll, make them look at the image for longer, or possibly even get them to “like” or comment will gain traction and possibly even go viral.
So did these platforms customize their algorithm to focus on body image, money, or an extravagant lifestyle?
No. They didn’t.
Instead, the algorithms just started feeding us what we look at most often.
A gorgeous model with a perfect body, an amazing house, the coolest car, and a beautiful happy family? That’s more likely to draw our attention than the picture our friend took of their dinner plate.
A picture is worth a thousand words, and a video is worth a million pictures.
Our brains can’t handle seeing this much information as adults, so our kids really have no chance. Let’s look at why.
Social media that uses photos and videos more than text are classified by some researchers as Highly Visual Social Media, or HVSM for short. These types of posts draw our attention. It feels so real. But really, our brains can’t identify that our physical reality is somewhat replaced by a sort of hyperreality. That’s because our minds can’t clearly distinguish what is real or what is fake.
Consider a post with a picture of a beautiful model again. She’s got perfect skin, hair, makeup, clothes… everything. But how real is that?
It’s hard to say, even when we’re imagining it. In the moment, it’s impossible.
In fact, what we are seeing is a construction of what we should look like in order to be considered beautiful.
And this is where things start to get really dangerous for our mental health because now we’re constantly bombarded with images and videos that involve lots of makeup, photo edits & filters, clothes that were borrowed from the store and returned after the photo was taken, or other things that might be unreachable or fake.
The platforms reinforce and teach people to keep posting things like that because that’s what people engage with — it’s what they want to see.
Social cognitive theory explains that people learn best by observing others that are getting positive reinforcement for what they are doing and start to imitate them. When we see that doctored photos get more likes than the average, we will start curating our own profile to generate more likes and comments without even consciously knowing that we are doing it. The dopamine that comes from likes causes instant gratification in our brain. It feels good.
Simply taking the phone away or using screen time to limit the amount of time spent on a platform doesn’t result in any substantial change. If you only spend 1 hour looking through videos or 10 minutes, it wouldn’t make a difference to the impact the highly visual hyperreality has on your brain. The 5 photos of models that pop up immediately would cause that social comparison in 5 seconds.
The way this works is that it’s really easy to fall into the trap of evaluating our own self-worth based on a comparison to others. It doesn’t matter if this comparison is to a real person that you know or just to a picture or video that you see on social media. That’s because, according to hyperreality theory, the posts on social media feel just as real as a person physically in the room with you.
But those posts contain a bunch of things that are unrealistic and unreachable for most people. If the most unrealistic and unreachable posts are the ones that generate the most likes, they are also the most likely to pop up on your feed. So in that 5 seconds where you see them, you (or your child) starts comparing themself.
And that’s where the feeling of dissatisfaction or remorse can turn quickly into lying about what they are doing, body dysmorphia, eating disorders, or even self-harm.
What can we do about it?
The National Social Anxiety Center recommends things such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, self-acceptance, affirmations, and journaling. All of these methods focus on the goal of restructuring the habits and thought patterns our brains use.
It starts with self-awareness and context.
And that’s hopeful. Because we can be active mediators for our kids.
If we ask them questions that force them to critically think about the potential consequences of the content they view or the online activities they engage in, then we can create good habits from the start.
That’s why it’s important to talk about things like mental health, social media, and digital literacy with your kids.
When you do talk to them, don’t lecture. Instead, try to have a conversation. Use “I” statements so that they know you’re coming from a place of concern and not criticism.
And be sure to listen to what they have to say too.
It can be easy to get wrapped up in our own thoughts and experiences. But it’s important to remember that they’re the ones living their lives online, not us.
So ask them questions such as:
- How do you feel when you scroll through your feed?
- Do you ever compare yourself to other people?
- What kind of posts make you feel good?
- Do you ever feel like you need to post something in order to get approval from others?
- How do you think people’s lives might be different than what they show on social media?
Show them that you have a deeper understanding and aren’t coming from a place of condemnation.
The goal is to help them develop a healthy relationship with social media and foster good habits from the start.
