Meta feeds teens more Instagram posts linked to eating disorders: Report

Vulnerable teens who reported feeling bad about their bodies significantly watched “eating disorder-adjacent” content on Instagram, according to a new report citing internal research from Meta.

Teens saw body-focused content with a “prominent” display of the chest, buttocks, or thighs; Judgments and comparisons between different body shapes; Content related to eating disorders and negative body image, The research obtained by Reuters found.

Some of the content was so explicit — such as images of thin women in lingerie, a woman’s neck being torn open and a drawing of a crying character with phrases like “How can I compare” and “End everything” — that researchers included a “sensitive content” tag for Meta staff, according to the report.

However, the photos do not violate Instagram’s guidelines and are permitted on the platform. Some content will be restricted under new teen safety guidelines written in the wake of the research, though it will not be banned from the platform.

“Research insights, coupled with expert consultation, are helping drive the important changes we’ve made to our platforms for teens and parents,” a Meta spokesperson told The Post.

He nodded to the changes made last year – when internal research was conducted – Place teen accounts in more restrictive content settings By default.

Meta announced last week that teen Instagram accounts will be there as well Guided by PG-13 ratings To provide safe and age-appropriate content to users.

The research for the new report was conducted during the 2023-2024 academic year. Meta surveyed 1,149 teens about whether and how often they felt bad about their bodies after using Instagram. The social media company, led by Mark Zuckerberg, then studied users’ content for three months.

For the 223 teens who said they often felt bad about their bodies after using Instagram, “eating disorder-adjacent content” represented 10.5% of what they saw on the platform. According to the report, such content made up only 3.3% of what other teens viewed on Instagram.

“Teens who reported frequent body dissatisfaction after viewing posts on Instagram… viewed body-focused/(eating disorder) content three times more than other teens,” Meta researchers wrote, according to a copy of the research obtained by Reuters.

Aside from content related to disordered eating, the same group of vulnerable teens also saw more posts falling under disturbing categories such as “mature themes”, “risky behaviour”, “harm and cruelty” and “suffering”, according to the research.

Provocative content represented 27% of all posts these teens viewed on the platform – compared to just 13.6% for their peers who did not report feeling bad after using Instagram.

“It is not possible to determine causal direction for these results,” the researchers noted, explaining that teens who feel bad about themselves may actively search for inappropriate content.

However, teens, parents, pediatricians, outside experts and Meta consultants have urged the platform to limit the amount of fitness and beauty content it exposes to teen users, according to the Meta report.

Meta said current content restriction tools are unable to detect 98.5% of “sensitive” content that may be inappropriate for teens, the report said.

But this finding wasn’t necessarily surprising, because Meta had not yet implemented its latest algorithm for detecting potentially harmful content, the researchers wrote in the study.