The Instagram Framework that Damages the Mental Health Of Marginalized Individuals
by Boluwaji Odufuwa
Mentor: Prof. Jasmine McNealy; Student Editor: Bhargavi Garimella
In a clear move of imitation made to increase their addictive appeal, Instagram rolled out its new Reel feature earlier last week amid talks of an executive ban on the Chinese-based app TikTok. This is not the first time the Facebook-owned company has adopted the framework of a similar app in order to boost its user volume. For example, Instagram mirrored its then-new InstaStories feature in 2016 after a similar feature native to Snapchat. The intention behind the appropriation of these features comes in stark contrast to Instagram’s recent response to the continual fight for racial justice and nationwide concerns over mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. On one hand, Instagram has pinned racial justice resource guides and centered the works of mental health advocates on its Explore page while, on the other hand, continuing to redesign their platform in hopes of maintaining a monopoly on the attention of its users. If protecting the mental health of its users — specifically BIPOC and underrepresented users — was genuinely prioritized by Instagram, they would pair updates focused on making the app an habitual experience with tangible relief to marginalized communities. Why? Because platform changes such as these and the system in which Instagram operates disproportionately affect the mental health of those with marginalized identities.
The Instagram Attention Economy and Marginalized Communities
No, you and I are not the only people who find it difficult to exit out of Instagram once we have fallen into what seems like an endless scroll down our feed. In fact, Instagram and the majority of social media applications are designed to capture our prolonged attention. Isra Ali, an Assistant Professor in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, noted that social media companies operate within an attention economy. Businesses seeking to market products, not everyday users like us, are the target audiences of social media companies and they are always in need of user data and consumers to advertise to. Instagram is able to extract this user data by first maintaining our attention through new feature updates and then tracking how we interact with certain posts, promotions, and existing advertisements. According to Instagram’s terms and conditions we all blindly agreed to, we “concur that a business or other entity may pay [Instagram] to show our username, resemblance, photographs and/or potential moves we make, in association with paid or sponsored content or promotions.”
Although many people are aware that social media companies maintain our attention to mine user data, not many are aware of how or why social media is addictive. Simply put, it is not an accident. In order to successfully operate within the attention economy, Instagram has played upon our psychosocial reward system. Humans are predisposed to seek the feeling of being liked and belonging to a community and are rewarded with oxytocin and dopamine, neurotransmitters that govern our neural reward system, when they exhibit these feelings. In a natural social network, this instinct allowed our early ancestors to avoid ostracization from a group by performing acts that would demonstrate their agreeability within a community, thus boosting their chances of survival. An artificial social network takes advantage of this phenomenon and mimics the initial primary reward, a sense of belonging, with secondary rewards, engagement tokens such as likes, followers, retweets, and favorable comments. Now that Instagram has garnered over 1 billion monthly active users (MAU) according to Statisca, the application now operates like a natural social network where a user’s performance on the app plays a significant role in demonstrating their worth, likeability, and social status to their community.
But of course the social media attention economy and its artificial network does not affect everyone equally. It is logical to assume that those who have more access to a variety of leisure activities, such as vacations, sports, or extracurricular clubs, are more likely to use these activities as supplements to social media usage and are less likely to be frequent users of social media. A study done at the Cultural Communication and Computing Research Institute at the University of Liverpool confirms the flipside of this reasoning by concluding that those who are more likely to use social media are individuals who wield little to no social capital (low social status, subjects of oppression, lack of access to other forms of communication) and come from a low socioeconomic background. Marginalized communities are the main source of raw material for Instagram’s attention economy and they are taking the brunt of the negative effects social media has on mental health, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Instagram’s impact on a specific marginalized group: BIPOC Womxn
For centuries, the intersectionality of womxnhood and race has highlighted existing systems of oppression in our society such as — but not limited to — sexism and patriarchy, misogynoir, and systemic racism. Systemically, womxn of color wield less social and economic capital than their white, cisgender male counterparts — a characteristic that increases their likelihood of social media usage. With the advent of social media, not only has the aforementioned systems of oppression become more conspicuous, but it has also compromised how BIPOC womxn have come to view themselves and measure their worth by making them prime contributors to the social media attention economy.
“When I first started using Instagram in fourth grade, I definitely think it negatively impacted how I looked at myself,” says Kristian Hardy, a rising freshman at Harvard College and a Youtuber who has amassed tens of thousands of views on her college-related videos. As a Black womxn and social media creator, Hardy has become all too familiar with how social media has influenced the self confidence of womxn of color by idealizing Black features on a non-Black body. In an interview with me, she noted that her initial use of social media was accompanied by feelings of comparison, inadequacy, and a lack of belonging. But even when experiencing these negative feelings, she still could not log out of Instagram.
“It’s definitely intentional [from companies like Instagram] that social media has become so addictive and ingrained into our society today. Everyone is connected in some way through social media and some people just can’t afford to simply go off the grid and not use social media apps.”
Although Hardy has grown to be mindful of her social media usage and distinguish her worth from her content performance, her earlier experiences still align with the results of academic studies. Richard M. Perloff, a professor of communication at Cleveland State University who has written countless articles on the psychology of perception of the effects of mass media, concluded in a 2014 research study that women of color are more likely to experience body dissatisfaction and lowered self esteem from social media usage than any other ethnic-gender demographic. Instagram’s recent and future updates intended to increase addictive appeal have and will continue to increase the occurrences of BIPOC women exhibiting these mentally-detrimental behaviors.
What Changes can be made to Instagram and Social Media
Sadly, Instagram will not be departing from the attention economy and its business model anytime soon — but there are still demands that can be made and steps that can be taken to ensure that marginalized communities are not being mentally drained from social media:
Actions Marginalized Users Can Take
Demands All Users Can Make
- Demand and promote tech companies hiring more underrepresented Software Engineers
- Demand that social media outlets promote nonprofits dedicated to diversifying leisure activities in marginalized communities
Sources
- Yates, Simeon. “Social Media and Social Class.” Shura, 2018, shura.shu.ac.uk/18741/3/Lockley-SocialMedaiAndSocialClass%28AM%29.pdf.
- Perloff, R.M. Social Media Effects on Young Women’s Body Image Concerns: Theoretical
- Perspectives and an Agenda for Research. Sex Roles 71, 363–377 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-014-0384-6
