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<\/div>\n<\/div>E<\/span><\/span>mily started using Instagram<\/a> when she was in her mid-teens and found it helpful at first. She used the photo-sharing app to follow fitness influencers, but what began as a constructive relationship with the platform spiralled into a crisis centred on body image. At 19 she was diagnosed with an eating disorder.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI felt like my body wasn\u2019t good enough, because even though I did go to the gym a lot, my body still never looked like the bodies of these influencers,\u201d says Emily, now a 20-year-old a student who is in recovery.<\/p>\n Emily, who preferred not to use her real name, uses Instagram sparingly now. She is one of many Instagram users whose suffering came to prominence this week with revelations that the platform\u2019s owner, Facebook, seemed to know it was damaging teenage girls\u2019 mental health<\/a>.<\/p>\n According to internal research leaked to the Wall Street Journal<\/a> (WSJ), the app has made body image issues worse for one in three girls and in one Facebook study of teenagers in the UK and the US, more than 40% of Instagram users who said they felt \u201cunattractive\u201d said the feeling began while using the app.<\/p>\n Instagram has more than 1 billion users worldwide and an estimated 30 million<\/a> in the UK, with Kim Kardashian, Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande among the accounts with hundreds of millions of followers between them. In the UK, the Love Island couple Liam Reardon and Millie Court have already raced to a combined following of nearly 3 million since winning the 2021 title.<\/p>\n Two in five girls (40%) aged 11 to 16 in the UK say they have seen images online that have made them feel insecure or less confident about themselves. This increases to half (50%) in girls aged 17 to 21, according to research by Girlguiding<\/a> in its annual girls\u2019 attitudes survey.<\/p>\n Sonia Livingstone, professor of social psychology at the department of media and communications, LSE, describes adolescence for teenage girls as an \u201carc\u201d that tends to begin with the staple experiences of interest in pets, painting or playing with younger siblings, through to the more confident young woman ready to face the world. But it is the experience in the middle of that parabola that represents a particular challenge, and where Instagram can be most troubling.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is at that point where they are assailed with many answers to their dilemmas and a prominent answer at the moment is that it might be what they look like, that it matters what they bought,\u201d says Livingstone, who next week is due to give evidence to MPs and peers scrutinising the draft UK online safety bill, which imposes a duty of care on social media companies to protect users from harmful content<\/a>.<\/p>\n Facebook\u2019s in-depth research into the photo-sharing app stated that Instagram had a deeper effect on teenage girls because it focused more on the body and lifestyle, compared with TikTok\u2019s emphasis on performance videos such as dancing, and Snapchat\u2019s jokey face features. \u201cSocial comparison is worse on Instagram,\u201d said the Facebook<\/a> study. The leaked research pointed to the app\u2019s Explore page, where an algorithm tailors the photos and videos that a user sees, potentially creating a spiral of harmful content.<\/p>\n![\"Ariana](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/cef346df2c7ce8b93b83ebf8239aa8c595d9ebe4\/391_131_1302_1302\/master\/1302.jpg?width=380&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=12c5261c0f8e6141468398917179d359)
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