Regent Park Youth Discuss Instagram, Social Media, and the Culture of Personal Appearance.

By Dimitrije Martinovic
(Dimitrije is a journalist with the Focus Media Arts Centre)

In this instalment of 4Getabout!TV, the Regent Park youth collective made up of Jamelia Parnel, Saima Islam and Samir Anbdella speak with guest Rahia Ali, on the issue of toxic environments within social media platforms such as Instagram, and how young people, especially teenage girls are effected negatively by the proliferation of negative stereotyping related to body image.

In recent revelations made by a former employee of FaceBook, a corporation that owns Instagram, WhatsApp and numerous other companies, Francesca Haugen disclosed in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, that the company had knowledge that Instagram was “harmful to some of its younger user and was especially “toxic” to teenage girls.”

Haugen’s comments appear at odds with FaceBook’s stated position that, “We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content. To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true,” said Facebook spokesperson Lena Pietsch.

Part of the issue arises from Facebook placing their corporate needs above the needs of its users.  For example, $100 Billion dollars of revenue is derived from advertising toward young users. As one particular user explained, she joined Instagram at the age of thirteen and went on to spend countless hours viewing the glamorous and perfect lives of popularly featured influencers on the app. This constant repetition of certain body types, normalises an “Ideal” form that is both in-accurate and misguiding for a large proportion of the population. Through the number of “Likes” associated with a particular post, the general audience assumes that the shiny and bright world projected by social media is in fact the truth.

For teenage girls this realm of “automatic comparison” has the most devastating and immediate of manifestations, for example, one can get a great deal of positive attention for loosing weight, however, on social media the number of possible people who might “Like” your weight loss suddenly slips into the hundreds.

The issue of personal appearance moves into another dimension altogether when a whole new culture arises out of it, such as that of “Pretty Privilege,” which is a set behaviours and attitudes that are premised entirely on the physical appearance of someone. Based on appearance, a person may have more friends, their thoughts may count more, or they may find employment more easily. However, when these behaviours become embedded across social media platforms, countering their negative effects can exceeds the limits what one person can do.