Posted on by Bowie Qiu

Research shows the versatility of how social media impacts mental health

Instagram will conceal the number of image likes from selected users around the globe, the company announced via its official Twitter account on 14 November. The move intends to reduce social pressure on its users.

CEO of Instagram Adam Mosseri  said: “We will make decisions that hurt the business if they help people’s wellbeing and health.”

Speaking at the Wired25 summit in a conference on ‘using science and tech to make a future we all want to live in’, he said that the idea behind the test is to “depressurize Instagram” and “make it less of a competition”.

The trial was previously limited to six countries—Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Italy, Japan and New Zealand—but is now being rolled out globally, including in the UK.

Selected individuals will not be able to see the number of likes and views of any content posted on their feed, except their own.

In a statement on Twitter, Instagram said the decision to remove the ‘like’ feature was made so that users can “focus on what you share, not how many likes your posts get.”

Senior campaigns and communications executive at the Royal Society for Public Health Niamh McDade told Raven News that removing likes might have a positive effect on young people’s mental health by making Instagram less of a “popularity contest”.

However, she said, it is only “one of many aspects” that might have a negative influence on the well-being of young adults.

“The overall time that teenagers spent on social media, the type of content they are engaged with, comments from others as well as a range of other factors can also influence the mental health of young people.”

An increasing number of studies link mental health issues to social media platforms. A 2017 study conducted by the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) has rated Instagram the worst social media for young people’s mental health.

 

The visual nature of social media platforms encourage users to make appearance-based comparisons between themselves and what they see online.

The RSPH study shows that nine out of ten girls in the UK are unhappy with their bodies and that seven out of ten young people have experienced cyberbullying, of which over a third experience it on a “high-frequency basis.”

The study also shows that increased use of social media platforms is connected to a higher risk of depression.
Almost 80,000 young people in the UK suffer from severe depression and identified rates of anxiety and depression have increased by 70 per cent over the past 25 years.

DrPH at George Washington University Vinu Ilakkuvan, who studies health risks linked to social media, told Medscape that she advises not to overestimate the good-naturedness of social media companies.

“Trusting those who seek to make a profit from these platforms to self-regulate can only take us so far,” she said.

“At the end of the day, these companies are driven by profit, and will make more money the longer they keep users on their site.”