There’s a good chance that, even if you don’t know exactly what your teen has been looking at on Instagram over the past few years, you will have felt its shattering effects.
Maybe your daughter has turned to you in tears saying: ‘I’m so ugly, aren’t I?’, because the endless images of filtered perfection she swipes through don’t match what she sees in the mirror.
Possibly, as happened to me, you couldn’t get your child out of bed because they’d been scrolling all night on a phone you thought was safely charging in the kitchen.
So, when it was announced this week that Instagram was taking sweeping steps to give parents control, you could almost hear the collective sigh of relief.
With immediate effect, ‘teen accounts’ for under 18s in the UK, Australia, and the US will be introduced. These are automatically set to private, dialling down the risk of approaches from online predators. Parents have the option to see who they message and the topics they are following.
Instead of us having to nag kids to get off social media, Instagram will send younger users notifications if they’ve been on the app for more than an hour. Young people’s Instagram accounts will be automatically switched off between 10pm and 7am.
Of course, Instagram is not the only platform young people use when they should be asleep. They are as likely to be on YouTube, TikTok or Snapchat.
So are these finally the changes we’ve all been waiting for to keep our children safe? I am afraid that while they’re a step in the right direction, we’re not there yet.
For one thing, to me it seems you’ve just been recruited as free labour by a multibillion-dollar corporation. Overnight, it’s also your job to moderate your child’s Instagram use. Is it coincidence that this action comes as Meta is increasingly under fire from global regulators and lawyers in the US, Australia and the UK?
Now, if your child stumbles across disturbing content, these measures could make it look as if it’s also your fault for not making the most of their tools.
I checked my own Instagram for harmful content this week and it does seem that, probably with the extra help of AI, Instagram has finally got on top of pro-anorexia, suicide and self-harm content.
Even so, impressionable young people still run the risk of disappearing down unhealthy rabbit holes because as soon as they show an interest in one topic – whether it’s diets, school fight videos or fake information – it’s still likely the Instagram algorithm will feed them more of it.
We also have to ask why Instagram didn’t make these changes sooner. As long ago as 2019, leaked memos show Instagram bosses were looking into the possibility the platform could be toxic for teenage girls.
‘We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,’ read one slide from an internal presentation in 2019, leaked to the Wall Street Journal, though Meta now insists these were taken out of context.
Now governments and lawyers around the world say that Instagram knew the harm it was doing to young people but played it down for the sake of profits. Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, is being sued by 41 US states as a result.
I do have hope for the future, however, because I believe young people themselves are the best force for standing up to social media companies.
A couple of months ago, I asked my daughter Lily, a 22-year-old student, if she’d ‘like’ a few of my Instagram posts about my new book – because, ironically, I could do with a bit more engagement.
No, she replied. She’d was taking a month-long break from social media and had deleted her Instagram app, because its comparison culture stressed her.
Forty-five per cent of Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012) are working to reduce their screen time, according to research this week. Our children have been lab rats in a giant global social media experiment for too long.
Our job as parents is to help them pause, and notice for themselves how doom-scrolling really makes them feel.
- Tanith Carey is author of What’s My Tween Thinking? Practical Child Psychology for Modern Parents with Dr Angharad Rudkin (DK books).
But a Gen Z writer has a different verdict…
By Antonia Lenon
It’s positive that Meta is trying to give parents control over their teenagers’ Instagram activity, but it doesn’t tackle the problem at the heart of the platform.
Facebook, then Instagram and now TikTok may market themselves as fun ways to connect with others but, in practice, because they encourage you to share a carefully curated version of your life, they have become all about comparing yourself and competing with other people.
And much of this, because Instagram centres on pictures, boils down to what you look like.
I’m 26 and my first social media account was Facebook. I signed up when I was 11 and in Year 7. I quickly became obsessed with getting a ‘perfect’ profile picture.
This was an unfortunate hobby as I was, and still am, incredibly unphotogenic. My best friend and I would take her dad’s camera to the park to try to get the perfect shot of each of us. We never did.
When I compared mine to other girls’ photos, I felt I never looked as pretty.
The dawn of Instagram in 2010 and TikTok in 2016 meant this online world of comparison suddenly became vast. Instagram allowed me, an average looking 15-year-old, to measure myself against supermodels and other famously beautiful women.
And, while on Facebook you have one profile picture, on Instagram it’s normal to upload dozens of artful images of yourself.
In our mid-teens, my friends and I loved the Victoria’s Secret fashion show, a catwalk created by the American lingerie brand, featuring skimpily-dressed, toned models. Thanks to Instagram, we were able to follow online the supermodels taking part.
So began an unhealthy drip feed of airbrushed content from these dazzlingly beautiful women.
Why, I would ask myself, scrolling through their flawless photos, don’t I look like that? Why am I so short, so flat-chested? Why is my hair such a boring colour?
Instagram’s new measures allow parents to see who their child is messaging online, but you don’t need to be messaging someone to feel this aching inadequacy.
Yes, the app is taking steps to limit how much young girls see of the darkest content, stuff that actively promotes eating disorders or self harm. But the ‘normal’ content can also be devastating.
Because Instagram and TikTok are virtual spaces, I know it must be hard for parents who grew up in a world without social media to fully grasp what using these platforms as a teen is like.
If you think of them instead as a real place, like an after-school club, where a teenager could go and waste hours in the company of beautiful strangers and be told how incredible these women’s lives are, I don’t think you’d want them to go.
When I started university, I cried throughout Fresher’s Week after failing to find immediate friends. I remember sitting on my bed, exhausted and demoralised, and opening up Instagram. I was greeted by photos uploaded by my school friends.
They, it seemed, were having the time of their lives at their universities. They were posing with new friends, exchanging jokes in the comments, having fun nights out. I felt I couldn’t tell any of them how hard I was finding it, embarrassed that I was struggling with something they all seemed to find easy.
I ended up having a brilliant time at university, and know now – from conversations we had years later – that many of my school friends also found those early weeks very hard. The trouble is, no one ever shares those difficult moments online. It’s all about keeping up appearances.
Today, I still use Instagram but I put limits on my interactions. I deliberately don’t follow supermodels such as Kendall Jenner. I steer clear of the ‘explore’ page which tries to lure you towards glossy content uploaded by people you don’t follow.
There is lots of valuable content on Instagram – top chefs’ cooking tutorials, fabulous photography and hilarious, relatable comedy – but teenage girls gaining access to this digital world for the first time need all the help we can give them to navigate it safely.
