Last week, Facebook announced two new Instagram policies with the aim of creating a healthier culture around dieting and improving its users wellbeing
First, Instagram will prevent users under the age of 18 from being shown any adverts related to dieting whatsoever. Second, it will ban outright any adverts which make ‘a miraculous claim about certain diet or weight loss products.’ Goodbye, detox lollipops.
This week the company also announced that it’s trying out hiding ‘likes’ on Facebook, as it has already trialed with Instagram.
These policies might not be perfect, nor solve all of Instagram’s problems. A 2017 study found it to be the app with the worst effect on its users’ mental health, and it has also been linked with eating disorders and body image issues.
It’s easy to be cynical about Facebook’s motives, which presumably aren’t entirely altruistic. After all, it’s good PR for the company – particularly with the involvement of a high-profile celebrity such as Jameela Jamil.
We shouldn’t imagine that large corporations care about our wellbeing more than their own profits. But even if Facebook’s motives are cynical, that doesn’t mean its efforts are bad (it makes sense, from a business standpoint, that the company would want its platforms to be less toxic). The policies do seem to be a step in the right direction.
Few would argue, however, that they are sufficient in their own right. So what can else can social media companies do to safeguard the mental health of its service users? And is there a limit to what they can achieve?
To find out, we spoke with Dr Yysabel Gerrard, a lecturer in Digital Media and Society at the University of Sheffield, and one of the experts with whom Instagram consulted while drafting these new policies.
We also spoke with Emmy Brunner, CEO of the Recover Clinic and a psychotherapist who specialises in eating disorders and body image issues.
Brunner, it has to be said, is not particularly impressed with these recent announcements. She tells Metro.co.uk: ‘There still needs to be more of a relationship between service users and the company. Because Jameela Jamil has a large profile, they’ve said “thank you for telling us what to do, Jameela Jamil!”, and they’ve gone and done it.
‘Why aren’t they having normal users feedback to them? They’re so massive that it feels like they’ve got away with not providing any sort of relationship with their users. They’ve become a faceless powerhouse.’
For Brunner, the biggest problem with Instagram is a lack of vigilance and specificity when it comes to reporting harmful content.
‘When you want to report something on Instagram,’ she says, ‘it just gets flagged as reported. There’s no criteria as to why you’re reporting it, or why it might be problematic or offensive to you.
‘Why don’t they have more specific criteria? I think it’d help them screen things a lot more efficiently. It would clarify whether it’s something that’s just offending one person because it’s particularly triggering or if it’s something that’s really damaging that needs to be removed.’
Brunner is not convinced that the new policies are anywhere near sufficient to tackle the problem.
‘On the face of it,’ she says, ‘it seems as though they’ve done something really amazing but, really, is that the case?
‘Or is it that they’ve done the bare minimum to make everyone go away? The issue goes beyond just diet products.’
Dr Gerrard, on the other hand, takes a far more positive view of Facebook’s efforts. She tells us: ‘They are consulting with experts, they are reaching out to activists and health practitioners – all of which indicates a level of care.
‘There’s always going to be scepticism with social media that it could just be a PR stunt. But at the end of the day: they didn’t have to do this.’
That’s not to say that she thinks the policies are perfect.
‘One of the main challenges they’re going to have is deciding what counts as a “miraculous” claim about a product and how that gets defined,’ Dr Gerrard explains.
‘Already, we’re seeing things which need to be ironed out. But it’s a good first step.’
What does she think comes next?
‘For me, the main thing they have not figured out, and I’m worried they might never do, is how harmful content gets recommended to people. If you like a certain post or engage with certain people, you start seeing more and more content, which is sometimes harmful.
‘Sometimes you just need a day off from content about your eating disorder, or depression and anxiety, but you can’t get that.’
In 2017, a British teenager named Molly Russell took her own life after suffering from depression. Her father later discovered that she had been getting graphic images of suicide and self-harm recommended to her on Instagram for months prior.
She was even getting automatic emails from Pinterest, in which these images of death and violence were described as ‘things you might love’.
YouTube has had similar issues, with users being recommended ever more extremist, conspiratorial and often far-right content.
‘It’s not even technically a criticism,’ Dr Gerrard says, ‘because at the end of the day, if these platforms are recommending you content based on your behaviour, however harmful, then they are working exactly as they should.
‘Social media would have to work very differently for that not to be a problem.’
What about Facebook’s plans to hide ‘likes’? Is this something she thinks will help?
‘I think that it was a really interesting move. What it does is send the message that there has become a greater attachment to metrics and numbers and likes – your value as a person is defined by all this.
‘And in some ways we’ve always had that: for example, how much money you earn has often been seen as a barometer of your worth.
‘But I think it’s really helpful that they’re recognizing that the likes problem is something new, that that is something that has happened as a result of social media. I think hiding likes could have a positive effect.’
Whether it’s hiding likes, having a greater level of vigilance when it comes to reporting harmful content, or changing the ways in which harmful content is recommended, there is a lot more than Facebook could be doing to protect the wellbeing of its users.
But it’s also true that social media is ultimately a platform reflecting wider values and larger problems in society – however much it may amplify them.
As such, when it comes to eating disorders and mental health, there may be a limit to the change which any one company, or any one policy, can enact.
‘These dialogues aren’t just happening on social media,’ Brunner says, ‘they’re happening everywhere. What social media does is give us an insight into what people are thinking and feeling.
‘I don’t think it’s Facebooks’s sole responsibility to control that dialogue.’
The worry is that taking this view risks letting companies off the hook.
‘Recognising there are larger problems is not to say that Facebook couldn’t be doing more to keep people safe,’ Brunner says.
Dr Gerrard agrees that the problem extends further than social media alone. She tells us: ‘Fixing one policy isn’t going to fix decades, if not centuries, of women in particular (but increasingly men) being told how they should look, being sold products and creams, and the existence of normative standards of beauty.
‘The cosmetic and beauty industry, and the mass media, have been propagating this stuff for too long. Social media is shouldering too much of the blame.’
It seems that a lot of the emotional distress caused by social media is, at heart, a problem of comparison; it’s about looking at other people, and the lives they lead, and feeling inferior as a result. Obviously, this is a tendency which predates the internet.
‘What’s new, though,’ says Dr Gerrard, ‘is the form that comparison takes. Prior to social media, we often only saw images of celebrities or models.
‘But a big part of the appeal of influencers is that they’re just “normal people” who worked their way up. I feel it’s more problematic to compare yourself and your body to someone who you think is normal.
‘There’s an ordinariness to influencer culture which increases that feeling of comparison. You’re not going to look at Angelina Jolie in a film and compare yourself to her in the same way. With celebrities, you might think “well, they have to look that way.”’
This doesn’t just apply to professional influencers: it can also be true of people in your social circle who might, say, go to the gym more often than you, or take more holidays, or eat at nicer restaurants, or wear more expensive clothes.
Comparing yourself to an old friend from university who now earns a couple thousand a year more than you, and has a boyfriend, probably cuts deeper than comparing yourself to Kendall Jenner.
But no matter the degree of cynicism to which you assign its motives, it’s a positive thing that Facebook is beginning to take these issues seriously. Hopefully, its actions will have a positive influence on the industry at large.
Ultimately, the biggest catalyst for change might end up being that it’s in the vested interests of social media companies to tackle these problems. However addictive they may be, if using certain apps continues to make us miserable, surely it’s only a matter of time before we begin to look elsewhere.
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