Instagram tries to do damage control..
Alaina Demopoulos from The Guardian:
Sevey Morton first got an Instagram account when she was 10 years old. She used it to keep up with friends, but also to follow pop culture trends. Now 16, the San Diego high schooler says all the airbrushed perfection and slickly edited selfies from celebrities and influencers made her hyper-focused on her appearance, causing anxiety and body image issues.
“Being exposed to that at a very young age impacted the way I grew into myself,” Morton said. “There is a huge part of me that wishes social media did not exist.”
In the book, “Beauty sick,” practically every single girl that was interviewed was thankful that social media didn’t exist back in the 80s and 90s.
The sad thing is that if we don’t guide our kids, then they will always think about what others think about them, versus what Allah thinks about them. If our girls from an early age focus on Allah, then life will be easier for both them and their families! We sometimes think Islam makes our lives harder, but the reality is that it makes it simpler, easier, and more peaceful.
Does instagram have a solution? Sure it does, but they could have acted a lot sooner:
Jim Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, an organization that promotes safe technology for children, called the timing of Meta’s announcement “transparent.
“This is basically another attempt to make a splashy announcement when the company’s feeling the heat politically, period” Steyer said. “Meta has always had these capabilities and the ability to develop new features, and they could have done this to protect young people for the last 10 years. Now that we’re in the middle of a mental health crisis among young people that’s been significantly brought on by social media platforms like Instagram, they’re acting now under pressure from lawmakers and advocates.”
Even if the social media companies are acting to protect the youth under pressure, these stop gaps are not good enough according to experts:
For Jon-Patrick Allem, an associate professor at Rutgers School of Public Health who researches social media’s effects on teens, Instagram’s new rules do not seem radical. “I read a line in the New York Times that described these rules as ‘a sweeping overhaul’,” he said. “I can’t think of a worse way of describing this. I think instead, these are slight modifications on one app that will probably do some good, but not enough good.”
So basically, Instagram is like Morphine, and Instagram with the new teen restrictions is like Suboxone. You’ll still be hooked, but you can’t get as high as you used to.