Two years ago, a whistleblower revealed that Facebook knew that Instagram, which it owns, was causing significant harm to young people, predominantly teenage girls. Today, the company is being sued by dozens of US states for exploiting its users this way.
Facebook’s internal research is damning. “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” one slide from an internal company presentation read.
It was reported in another internal company presentation that: “Thirty-two per cent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.”
The company’s research found that these problems were unique to Instagram, and occurred due to its setup, which encourages people to look perfect and compare themselves to others.
The lawsuit against the company says that it uses deceptive practices to trap users with addictive and harmful features.
The harm has been significant indeed. Among users who reported suicidal thoughts, 13 percent in the UK and 6 percent in the US traced them back to Instagram. Another transatlantic study found more than 40 percent of Instagram users who reported feeling “unattractive” said the feeling began on the app; about a quarter of the teenagers who reported feeling “not good enough” said it started on Instagram.
We all know why this has happened. Social media companies, like all businesses, are primarily concerned with making as much profit as possible. The fact that they exist inside a capitalist economic system drives them to put profits ahead of the health of vulnerable young people, or any people at all.
Under a socialist economic system, society could choose to remove the harmful features from social media apps as soon as they’re discovered to be causing harm. But because Instagram exists in a capitalist society, its owners and management are incentivised to maximise profit at the expense of driving its customers to have suicidal thoughts and eating disorders.
Moving beyond capitalism, we’ll be able to develop social media services that are designed to maximise human well-being.
In the meantime, we need to demand that safety features be put in place to keep Instagram’s users from coming to harm. We also need to demand that Facebook’s executives face criminal prosecution for taking action to deliberately harm people in exchange for profits.
Profit should never come before people’s wellbeing. After we build socialism, people will come first.
