Instagram has finally realised it poses a danger to children. No, the app isn’t banning under-16s altogether, though that would be prudent. Instead, its parent company Meta has decided to prevent them from livestreaming without the approval of their parents. As part of its new Teen Accounts system, they will also require permission to disable a feature designed to blur images that may contain nudity.
These are noble attempts at undoing some of the damage Instagram has undoubtedly already done to teenagers – more than one in 10 adolescents have shown signs of problematic social media behaviour, according to a WHO report from last year. But they seem to be missing the point. Because the risks social media pose to children have little to do with the odd nude image, or the ability to livestream someone’s journey to school. In fact, I’d argue these factors have almost nothing to do with it all.
Because the threats that Instagram poses to teenagers are the same as the ones they pose to us. They’re just magnified – not least because teens spend an average of 4.8 hours a day on social media. By now, we know all about the links between screen time and poor mental health. It’s not hard to join the dots here: more time spent staring at a phone instead of talking to a real person will, at best, exacerbate feelings of loneliness and, at worst, put you at risk of brainwashing depending on the content you’re consuming. As a teenager, though, you’re obviously a lot more vulnerable to all this.
I shudder to think about what life would’ve been like for me and my friends had Instagram been around back then. I was 16 when the app launched in 2010. But it would take a few years before any of us started using it properly; for many years it was simply a glorified photo editor. How pure we were. Except we weren’t, not really. Like all teenagers, my friends and I were riddled with insecurities about who we were, how we looked, and what other people thought about us. We were obsessed with who fancied who, who had started having sex, and who hadn’t, and what everyone was saying about us behind our backs. All of this noise would’ve been so much louder had we been using Instagram, a platform where all of us are encouraged to present a perfect version of ourselves to the world.
Unfortunately, a lot of us also suffered from eating disorders. For whatever reason, this wasn’t ever something I struggled with beyond the odd wobble. But had I been exposed to the stream of filtered selfies, celebrity photos and holiday snaps that teenagers see on an almost hourly basis on their phones, I can almost guarantee that those wobbles would’ve developed into something worse.
One of the things that makes Instagram so disastrous for our brains is the comparison culture it has created. And while adults are better equipped with the tools to deal with that – I have strict boundaries around the kinds of people I follow (mostly friends or work-related accounts) and those I don’t (anyone I think might exacerbate underlying insecurities) – most teenagers are not. Cue a deluge of Fomo, self-loathing and a relentless search for external validation that could take decades of therapy to undo.
Of course, this culture exists without the internet – I recall 14-year-old friends regularly comparing the size of their breasts in the bathroom. But it’s a hell of a lot noisier with it. Because the people you’re comparing yourself to aren’t just your friends any more, or the celebrities you might’ve seen photos of in a magazine (remember those?). It’s anyone and everyone with a smartphone, all of whom are being fed to you by a mysterious algorithm that’s being controlled from Silicon Valley by one man in a quarter-zip fleece.
I haven’t even mentioned what Instagram addiction can do to children, depriving them of social interaction as well as sleep. In 2023, Meta was sued by 33 states claiming it had violated consumer protection laws by unfairly luring children onto its platforms and misleading users about child safety. The case was ultimately dismissed – but many similar lawsuits have since been levelled against the tech behemoth.
Meta’s new restrictions are obviously a good start when it comes to tackling this, don’t get me wrong. But they’re completely neglecting to acknowledge the actual threats that Instagram is posing to kids. The policies are based on archaic, pre-internet ideologies, whereby the villain in all this is the child. You think they’re out there live-streaming the most dangerous content to one another? And that’s the reason why poor mental health is soaring among teenagers? Please.
Ultimately, Instagram’s Teen Accounts system is only just starting to scratch the surface with all this. The sad thing is that it might be too little, too late. Because you can’t put the #genie back in the bottle. All you can do is pause to reflect, and realise that it probably should’ve never been released in the first place.
