React for 600d: Tweaking Instagram for your Sanity
When the keynote lecture (a short, motivational speech by Dr. David Levy of the Information School at the University of Washington) ended at 11 AM, I had only a vague sense of what the day would have in store for me at HackMentalHealth’s Reverse Hackathon. It was Saturday, June 9, 2018 and we were at one edge of SoMa, holed up at the California Institute for Integral Studies (CIIS), the same venue that hosted the first ever HackMentalHealth event. Outside, through the glass windows of Namaste Hall, that large auditorium on the 3rd floor, you could see that it was a quintessentially balmy day in San Francisco, the kind of sun-splashed day where, only a few blocks away, there would undoubtedly be a throng of people congregated in the central square of Hayes Valley, friends and lovers spending calm, weekend time together, the line out Souvla, that Greek place, probably as long as ever.
Admittedly, it was a bit tough at first not to focus on what we might have been missing out on, the day as beautiful as it was, but as with the inaugural hackathon in February, Stephen Cognetta and crew managed to attract a capacity crowd of mostly millennial hackers with a passion for mental health, along with a smattering of academics and practicing clinicians like myself. Unlike the first event, though, this was a one-day event and no coding was required; teams were obliged only to pitch a well-developed idea with a final presentation.
Folks like myself who had not come into the event with prebaked ideas or preformed teams were asked to choose an area of interest related to the the theme of the event: designing tech more responsibly with respect to its effect on users’ mental health. As a kind of brainstorming exercise, the organizers asked attendees to divide themselves into groups within Namaste Hall according to five subtopics of interest: addiction, attention, authenticity, bullying and relationships. They then passed out small squares of colored paper with inspirational quotes pertaining to technology and mental health. The idea was to get small groups of people to use the quotes as springboards for discussion.
I meandered about the auditorium and finally settled on authenticity, because why not? It seemed to me that, in 2018, we had unwittingly constructed a culture in which no one was really who she portrayed herself to be. Instead, people had morphed into Hollywood movie posters of themselves, air-brushed of imperfection, never to be seen in a moment of “real life” as in the cinéma vérité of bygone years . Within this covey of people interested in promoting authenticity in technology, a smaller group of us started bantering about the emotional perils of social media use. Over the course of the conversation, we circled around the toxicity of Instagram and Tinder, in particular, and seemed to ping pong between the two as a means of homing in on an idea.
At forty-five years of age, married and the proud father of a teenage son, I was easily twice the average age of our little brigade. I mentioned that my only knowledge of Instagram was through my son, who summoned me on occasion a year or so ago to film him doing magic tricks to post to his account; and that my only knowledge of Tinder was through the mostly cringeworthy stories that my patients told me about their online dating experiences.
But, here we were, five strangers who managed to come together to put our minds to work to help shape tech into something better than what it had become. Our group included myself, Jennifer Chiang, Director of Student Success at Yup Technologies, and three college students: Nina Thiébaut, Savita Medlang and Lalitha Donga. All super lovely people.
Nina expressed her strong feelings about Instagram from the get go. She told us that she had forbidden herself from creating an account because she feared just how negatively it would impact her mental health. She cited, as an example, a woman who was in the habit of deleting any selfie from her Instagram if the image did not garner at least 140 likes.
This got our group talking about how limiting it is that Instagram only allows you to “like” a post, rather than react with some other emotion. And how comparing yourself to your friends and acquaintances on the issue of likes and followers can cause vulnerable individuals, especially young people, to suffer repeated blows to their self-esteem, possibly leading to depressed states of mind. It seemed to us that Instagram had been designed in a way to promulgate the idea that only the best moments and scenes of one’s life were worthy of sharing. The underlying design of Instagram, after all, relied upon a kind of token economy that rewarded users with dubious, absurd reinforcers such as number of likes and followers one had, rather than something meaningful and healthy, such as emotional connection.
So, as a group, we discussed how Instagram in its current incarnation was a perilous space to share emotionally vulnerable posts. If a friend posted a picture of her beloved dog to announce that he had passed away, for example, would it be reasonable to “like” it with the red heart emoji and then leave it be? Or to “like” it and then comment below: “So sorry for your loss. Doug was the like best dog ever!”
Why was it the case, we wondered, that Instagram didn’t have a fuller range of emotions to express an appropriate response to such posts? And what if it could be redesigned to do so? Would it create a healthier environment for its users?
Facebook (Instagram’s parent company), for example, had already figured out that it would benefit from having a range of reactions from which users could react to a post, including the inimitable shaking, angry face emoji:
As we got to talking about how we’d redesign Instagram, we discussed other features, too, such as replacing the displayed number of followers with a handful of colored “Follow” buttons that would indicate various strata of followers, all the way from zero (white) to 100,000,000 or more followers (diamond-colored). This would mimic, in a way, LinkedIn’s practice of not specifying number of followers beyond 500, for example. Finally, we discussed the possibility of using sentiment analysis and natural language processing of user posts to allow the platform to suggest empathic responses in the comments section.
So, there it was: our preliminary hack of Instagram! Because we decided to allow users to choose from among 6 emotional reactions to posts, we figured that the number six ought to make its way into our team name. We also wanted to do good, of course. Good with a with a capital G. That was the whole point of the Reverse Hackathon. And, voila! Someone — I can’t recall whom now — suggested that we use ‘6’ to replace the ‘G’ in Good. We settled on calling our team “React for 6ood”. (Okay, so maybe not the catchiest or most intuitive name to ever grace a hackathon team, but we were not about to let ourselves get bogged down by the relatively frivolous task of coming up with a decent team name).
As we set out to work on our redesign of Instagram, I decided that I wanted to further research just how bad Instagram was for its users’ mental health. I wanted to know if there were any formal studies on Instagram, in particular. I figured that there were probably a number of studies on social media in general and, perhaps, Facebook more specifically. So, I did a simple search on PubMed using the following terms: “Instagram [ti] AND mental”. Only 4 articles returned and of those, the only one that seemed particularly relevant was this one:
Cyberpsychol Behav Soc Netw. 2017 Oct;20(10):603–609. doi:
10.1089/cyber.2017.0156.Browsing, Posting, and Liking on Instagram: The Reciprocal Relationships Between Different Types of Instagram Use and Adolescents’ Depressed Mood.
Frison E(1), Eggermont S(1).
Author information:
(1)Leuven School for Mass Communication Research, Faculty of Social Sciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium .Although studies have shown that Instagram use and young adults’ mental health are cross-sectionally associated, longitudinal evidence is lacking. In addition, no study thus far examined this association, or the reverse, among adolescents. To address these gaps, we set up a longitudinal panel study among 12- to 19-year-old Flemish adolescents to investigate the reciprocal relationships between different types of Instagram use and depressed mood. Self-report data from 671 adolescent Instagram users (61% girls; MAge = 14.96; SD = 1.29) were used to examine our research question and test our hypotheses. Structural equation modeling showed that Instagram browsing at Time 1 was related to increases in adolescents’ depressed mood at Time 2. In addition, adolescents’ depressed mood at Time 1 was related to increases in Instagram posting at Time 2. These relationships were similar among boys and girls. Potential explanations for the study findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.
DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2017.0156
PMID: 29039700 [Indexed for MEDLINE]
I pulled the full-text article and read it while my teammates worked on our presentation of our redesign of Instagram. Essentially, this study out of Belgium suggested that passive browsing of Instagram posts at Time 1 by 12 to 19 year old Flemish adolescents was associated with increased depressed mood at a later time, Time 2 (6 months later). Moreover, depressed mood at Time 1 in this sample of 671 adolescents was associated with increased posting at Time 2. Although the study data are correlational in nature, the suggestion, of course, is that passive browsing on Instagram (i.e. simply viewing posts) results in depressed mood and, conversely, that depressed mood results in increased posting. The authors suggest that their data fit a theory known as Mood Management Theory which posits that social media use is purposeful in the management of moods.
Not satisfied with the limited results of the PubMed search, I decided to Google search Instagram and mental health. As it turns out, the Royal Society for Public Health in the U.K. and the Young Health Movement conducted a survey study of young people’s social media use in 2017 and published their results in a report entitled “#Status of Mind: Social media and young people’s mental health and wellbeing.” The report highlights that 91% of young people aged 16 to 24 use the Internet for social media. In this self-report study of 1,479 young people in this age group, Instagram ranked as the social media platform that was the worst, overall, for mental health.
For interested readers, the full report can be found here:
https://www.rsph.org.uk/uploads/assets/uploaded/62be270a-a55f-4719-ad668c2ec7a74c2a.pdf
Okay, so now we were satisfied that we were working on a meaningful problem that had research data to support the existence of the problem in the first place: the negative mental health impact of Instagram use in young people.
We identified the following problems with the current model of Instagram:
- Triggering anxiety by way of comparison among users (i.e. comparing yourself to others with respect to number of followers and likes)
- Having only one default reaction with which to respond to a post
- Not having any guidance on how to respond to posts with vulnerable content
Our proposed solution to the first problem included eliminating displaying the exact number of followers a user had. Instead, in our model, the number of followers a user had would be indicated only by a color corresponding to different level of followers, with white corresponding to zero followers and a diamond color corresponding to 100 million plus followers:
To address the second problem above, we decided that it would be important to allow users to react meaningfully and authentically to posts, instead of simply “liking” them with the red heart emoji. The six emotional reactions that users could select in our redesign include happiness, laughter, sadness, anger, surprise/fear and confusion. While these reactions don’t, of course, capture the full range of nuanced emotions that human beings are capable of experiencing and expressing, we felt that from a user experience perspective, limiting reactions to just six emotional responses would be more manageable for users, overall.
The purpose of this particular feature redesign was to encourage authenticity in emotional communication. We also decided that we would eliminate displaying the number of likes associated with a post, to minimize the risk of negative comparison.
The final element of our Instagram tweak involved the application of sentiment analysis and natural language processing to user posts to recommend suggested short phrase responses that would promote empathy and emotional support, sort of in the way that Gmail for mobile devices presently suggests short responses based upon the text of the email received.
Overall, we believe that modifying Instagram to include these tweaks would be fairly easy to implement and, moreover, that doing so would amplify the positive aspects of this social media platform while going a long way to minimize its more harmful aspects. Of course, we now need someone at Facebook to take notice and to care. Unfortunately, I fear that is a harder problem to hack.
