Downloaded from YTS.MX
- I have, like,
some notes on my leaving speech at Instagram.
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
It says, "I joined three years ago
"as the first international employee based out of London.
"I couldn't imagine leaving our community
"in better hands.
"I've met so many amazing people
"and had the chance to change lives.
"Learning to laugh at yourself, humility,
"and always thank the little people."
Kind of crazy that you have all these things in here,
you know, like a trip down memory lane.
My name is Hannah Ray.
I worked at Instagram as a community manager
for Europe, Middle East and Africa.
I'm Greg Hochmuth.
I was one of the first engineers at Instagram.
My name is Andy Warr.
I was the Head of Research there.
My name is Chris Messina.
And I am best known
for inventing the hashtag.
It's a little hard to see,
but I've got a little hashtag tattoo
right here on my wrist.
So...yeah.
Instagram was this place
where you posted your best self,
the digital representation of you
that you wanted to portray to your friends.
Now follower counts have like a certain social currency.
Maybe we weren't quite aware
that we were kind of kingmaking in that way.
I think comes a point
when you just aren't in control of it anymore.
And then it, like, took on a life of its own.
- Facebook's Instagram app...
..can be toxic for teenagers...
..and Facebook knows it.
She's the former Facebook employee
turned whistleblower,
whose revelations are reverberating
around the world.
- "The company's leadership
"knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer.
"They have put their astronomical profits
"before people."
My name is Frances Haugen.
We're facing one of the fundamental conflicts
of our civilization -
which is are we going to let algorithms rule us,
or will people rule algorithms?
How do we increase engagement,
how do we increase time spent?
I didn't feel like that was the best use
of people's time.
We don't fully understand what the consequences
of this period will be.
This is just the beginning.
And the thing that I think young people see,
that maybe people a little bit older than them don't,
is how intense the problems are,
because teenagers are killing themselves
because of Instagram.
This challenge of, like,
making Instagram feel less pressurised
I think is very difficult, if not impossible.
Could we predict?
I don't even know.
I don't know how to answer that question, really.
I'm gonna go with no...?
- My name is Lauren Black and I'm an influencer.
I have 123,000 followers.
One of my ex-boyfriends' sisters
actually bought me a book for Christmas about blogging,
and that was when I started my Instagram.
I was posting about fashion, every day,
like, what I was wearing,
like, outfit of the day posts.
I went full time about six months after starting.
I took a massive risk by, like, leaving uni
and not having any savings.
And I just threw everything that I had into it.
Hi! Oh!
- She loves beautiful ladies. - Aw, thank you.
I started posting IGTV videos.
And that took me from about 30,000 followers
to over 100,000 followers.
It was quite a jump,
it was something that
I wasn't really mentally prepared for.
I was quite anxious because every day
I had to then please
thousands more people than usual.
I was on Instagram all the time,
like my screentime was like 13 hours a day.
It was, like, from the moment I woke up
until the moment I went to sleep.
I'd literally just be scrolling.
And, like, liking other people's pictures,
and, like...yeah, just scrolling.
- I'm Manish Raghavan.
I worked for the Responsible AI team.
We served to try to help other teams within Facebook
better understand how to build
and deploy AI responsibly.
If you want to understand why Instagram is the way it is,
you have to understand how the algorithms have shaped it
to be that way.
They are the result of people's choices.
- The goal of any social media company
is to make sure that you spend as much time
on that platform as possible,
and engage as much with content
on that platform as possible.
Different algorithms underpin platforms like Instagram.
It's a way of ordering things.
It's a way of saying yes or no to something.
What people often think
about how social media feed systems work
is that they're one algorithm,
and that somebody sits down and writes that algorithm
and says, "If you have two photos,
"one of them is a person and one of them is a cat,
"people are more important than cats,
"so we're gonna rank the person above the cat."
But there is no one algorithm
that is written down that determines
the order in which you see things
on your Instagram feed, on your Facebook News Feed
or on your Google search.
The crucial thing about those algorithms
is that they use hundreds of machine learning models.
The way that the hundreds of machine learning models
interact with each other
is determined by the overarching metric
that guides the feed ranking system.
In Instagram,
that overriding metric
that orients the machine learning models
is meaningful social interactions.
The meaningful bit cannot just be about the people
that are close to you, like friends and family.
It can be about stuff that you're interested in.
Instagram figures out who is meaningful to you
and who tends to engage often with the content you produce.
They predict whether you're likely to like a post,
whether you're likely to share a post
or whether you're likely to comment underneath the post.
And so interactions from the people closer to you
tend to be prioritised above interactions
from people who are further out
in that network from you.
- What Instagram is looking to do
is keep you engaged in some way.
This is slightly different from asking
what do you actually want to see?
The algorithms are the most opaque part
of this whole system.
You can see the user behaviour,
you can see sort of like the consequences
of what happens as a result of being exposed
to certain content,
especially over and over again.
But we don't necessarily understand,
and some of the companies don't even understand,
how content is targeted to different individuals,
what choices they made to go down certain paths.
And that lack of awareness
is where we're the most vulnerable.
I've always had problems with food
since I was a teenager.
I used to collect 'Vogue'
and all fashion magazines anyway.
So, I already was aspiring
to be model-like.
When I started this job,
I didn't realise, like,
the impact of looking and comparing myself
to other people had on my mental health.
And my eating disorder got worse over the years.
- I think the thing that's really important
for people to understand is how Instagram
differs from other social media platforms.
Tik Tok is about performance.
It's about doing fun things with your friends.
Snapchat is about faces and augmented reality.
You know, it's not actually you.
It's you with a mask on.
Facebook's internal research
says that Instagram is about bodies
and about social comparison.
You know, it's about seeing
these little windows into other people's lives
and comparing, like,
what is your life like to theirs?
The human brain is not evolved
to deal with social media.
It isn't evolved to look at a screen all day
and be able to understand, let's say,
that the thing that
you're seeing on the other side of the screen
isn't someone's real life.
- Everyone that I followed on Instagram then
would have been probably like from sizes four to six.
And that was kind of what I was trying to achieve.
- The algorithms are looking for the content
that will lure you in.
These algorithms are always looking for the rabbit hole
that you are most vulnerable to.
You can start with quite innocuous interests,
you know, you can search for healthy eating.
These rabbit holes normalise the idea
that you should be extremely thin
and is it your fault if you're not.
- So, I used to see myself
as bigger than what I was.
Yeah, it was kind of unconsciously...
..it started getting bad.
I basically just ignored when I was hungry.
And when I did eat,
it would just be the tiniest amount.
I woke up and I was so busy with work
that I just put it off for as long as possible.
And I feel like that's kind of like
the sense of self harm
of having an eating disorder.
It's just basically starving yourself.
When I look back on pictures now,
you can clearly see that I was ill.
But when I was in the middle of it all
I just didn't really know.
I think I thought if I changed myself
then I would gain more followers
and get all these new opportunities.
I just created this,
like, like, vision in my mind that if I went and did this
then this would be the outcome.
And it just...it was a lie.
- There were things that we were aware of
that we would feed back.
The hashtag 'thinspo' has just popped up
and it should probably be banned.
So, those things would come up
and then we'd kind of jump on them
and quickly figure out, like,
the best policy to do that.
But you have to remember, that's alongside, like,
loads of other kind of firefighting issues
that were popping up.
I mean, daily,
there were, like, new things coming up
that I think are just part of, like, just how huge
the platform was growing so quickly.
At the time I joined,
Instagram had celebrated its third birthday.
So, I remember that month I was in California training.
And the whole sky was pink.
And it just felt like being in an Instagram filter.
You know, and then the cab
was going down places like Valencia and Dogpatch,
and those were names of filters,
you know, on Instagram.
So, I really felt like I'd somehow descended into,
you know, the world of Instagram.
- At the time, we honestly didn't really have a clue
how big it was, how much it was growing.
I would go to many concerts.
As people were taking photos
of their time at the show,
I would look over and I would see on their phone,
"Oh, like, that's Instagram, that's the filter screen."
- So, I was friends with the creators of Instagram.
I ended up being invited to a beta of this product.
We were certainly plenty naive,
and I think we had ideas
about the world and about how technology
could improve the world.
Priorities were basically, like,
make a very simple app
whose main goal is to help you share a photo,
make it look beautiful.
It did create this very nice feedback loop
people really enjoyed.
I post the photo, I get these likes.
- My name is Cole Rise,
and I designed the original icon
and seven of the filters.
Instagram's brand was about covering
how bad the cameras were in the phones of the day.
They were very pixely.
So how do you make a great photo?
You put a nice, heavy filter on it
that makes it something else.
It's not supposed to be true to life.
There was probably, like,
a certain je ne sais quoi about Instagram
that we would call, like,
the Instagrammy-ness.
The vibe that we had tried to cultivate and create
on the community team.
I found these postcards.
These are, like...
..the brand values that we had at the time.
Simplicity matters,
and inspire creativity,
and, my favourite,
community first.
I still say that a lot today, actually.
- I think so many of the essence
of how we built the product were around, like,
what's going to be good for a person?
Like, what's the next most important thing
that we can work on
that's going to make someone's life better?
The biggest team, actually, at least in my mind,
was the community team,
who were all focused on looking
at what's happening on Instagram,
engaging with active users,
starting conversations,
highlighting interesting users,
picking who was featured and things like that.
We had a number of different ways
that we would feature people.
The main Instagram account,
which was just @Instagram.
It was, like, the most followed account
in the world.
I think it still has a bigger circulation
than 'The New York Times'.
Like, it was a hugely kind of impactful real estate
to share someone's story.
And whenever we would share
someone's story on there,
quite often, you would see
their kind of follower count
and everything blow up for them.
It felt kind of worrying, you know,
to kind of be making those editorial decisions.
Partly because of the huge influence and impact
it could have on someone's life.
I think we knew we were on, like,
the cusp of something big that was happening
and powerful and impactful.
I don't think we were aware, on the Community Team,
of how big it was gonna get.
- This world that Instagram had created,
where you could present your life as more beautiful
and interesting than it actually was.
Where you could see into
all these really interesting lives and careers,
and places in the world, from your phone.
That was so exciting
that it grew so quickly
and caught the attention of Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg wanted to make sure
that he got to Instagram
before any of his competitors did
and that he made sure that they joined Facebook.
So he offered them a billion dollars,
which is more than anyone had ever paid
for a mobile app before.
- Kevin opens the conversation and says,
"You know, we've been talking to Facebook
"over the last few days,
"and they made an offer to acquire us".
At this moment I think what goes through my head
and what goes through
everyone else's head, I believe,
is the next sentence will be,
"And we rejected them".
And then the very next thing Kevin says is,
"and we accepted and we signed".
I remember walking back
from that little circle to our desks again
next to one of my co-workers,
and he just whispers to me,
"This is not how I thought it was going to end".
And I think that's what everyone felt.
This idea that, like, this ride that we're on,
this roller coaster of being in control
of our own destiny,
growing a small little thing
that we've been working on our own
was like suddenly over.
Instagram essentially had to decide,
do we want to go up against Facebook,
which is this behemoth?
Or is this our time to, one,
get a pretty significant payout,
and be able to build upon
Facebook's existing infrastructure, platform,
and then cater to all of Facebook's users.
But at the time it was shocking.
It definitely gave me pause
and a moment to be like, uh...
I don't know if this is ultimately
going to be the best thing for this community.
Facebook has tried over and over and over
to make a product that will appeal to young people.
They had these labs that were turning out
new kinds of apps to possibly create a new hit.
Nothing really worked.
Their main avenue
into the youth audience is Instagram
and whatever Instagram can create,
and in order for Facebook to stay relevant,
Instagram needs to maintain that...that cache with youth.
There was this really burning question
from folks on the Facebook side,
to understand our own growth
in a way that we had never really been
as eager about or as specific about.
You know, previously, success for us meant
that we built a good product, that, like,
the things we worked on were doing really well,
that, like, people using them felt good about them.
Shifting from that mindset
to something where success is just measured by numbers
in a very plain way.
Over time, that became much more and more
part of the way things were done,
things were evaluated, things were designed.
I definitely noticed a change
when we launched ads,
and when we started to onboard brands
onto the platform.
Now, looking back,
what I've seen or what I've realised
is with the launch of ads and brands on the platform,
this kind of tension or friction
was created between brands
that were almost trying to act like individuals,
and individuals that then start to act like brands.
- When I first started doing Instagram,
there was no such thing as influencing.
I come from a modelling background.
A few years later than that Instagram came about.
And obviously you like to take pictures,
it's a picture app.
So, from my modelling history, I was like,
OK, great, this is for me.
I was very consistent with Instagram
and I enjoyed it.
Like, you get free meals, you get to go to restaurants.
I've even got holidays for promo as they call it.
There's so many Instagram stylists.
I feel like unless girls see you working
with a massive influencer...
Don't wanna work with you.
..they don't wanna work with you
or they don't want to book your services.
They just want to go who's popping
because they've gone there.
- I've got some friends that...
They will go to all these Instagram people,
and then when the people mess up their hair,
they will come back to me.
I'm like, "I'm not doing your hair!"
You better just...
You know your friend does hair
why didn't you go and meet your friend before?
Why are you coming to me?
OK, so first of all,
I would like to say Instagram World is fake.
Instagram's kind of like a facade.
It's kind of like made the highlife
look so easily accessible.
At 21, I'm getting on a private jet.
It's not like that at all.
I remember when people started getting paid to post,
and that idea
quickly makes what you post a bit artificial,
where some people are doing, like, full-on BMW ads
and it's not genuine to who they are as a person
because I know that person.
They don't drive a BMW.
The core of Instagram, as I remember,
it was just, "Here's what's happening."
But if what's happening is an ad
then there's an artificiality to it.
Look at bloody COVID-19,
they was paying influencers to...
Yeah, to say that they're doing it.
They was paying influencers
to promote the vaccine.
What?
Instagram followers are very important,
especially if you want to be paid as an influencer.
My long-term goal for how many followers I want
is probably a billion.
I want a billion followers.
- Now follower counts have, like,
a certain social currency,
as if it's some kind of golden ticket
to unlocking the universe.
The more followers we get,
the more comments we get, the better.
We have also become growth obsessed,
and it's thanks to Facebook and Instagram
in the way that they have let us measure ourselves
that we think that way.
- I decided to get fake followers.
I can't remember what the package was.
It wasn't even that much.
I think I paid, like... Maybe, like, £100.
And it basically was, like,
I got 3,000 likes on each picture,
and then I think I gained, like, 10,000 followers,
because it did take me from, like, 10,000 to 20,000.
But then after that,
it was like why are all my followers Russian
and why are all these comments in Russian?
Like, what's going on?
We need to get cracking,
we've got, like, literally 10 minutes - let's go.
- It's not very hard to get fake followers,
fake likes, etcetera, on Instagram.
You just, you just need an internet connection
and a credit card.
I'm Sophie Zhang,
or Zhang Sui Feng in Mandarin.
I was a data scientist at Facebook
on what's called
the fake engagement team.
I also conducted work on Instagram.
Back in late 2019 and early 2020
roughly ten percent of follows
on Instagram were fake.
This is a very rough estimate,
but considerably higher than Facebook.
It creates an environment of constant doubt
and insecurity and uncertainty.
- I had to go and block
all these fake Russian accounts.
Every time they commented I had to, like, block them.
Lucky I did that because after I did that,
Instagram had this thing
where they started shutting down accounts
that had fake followers.
So, you would see, like, celebrities, for instance.
One of my friends,
their Instagram account was just, like,
gone the next day, I was like, what?
I was like, bro, where's your account?
Let's just do one more.
And he was like, "Oh, I got hacked",
and everyone knew, no,
Instagram's going around
shutting around fake accounts.
So that was quite embarrassing.
But luckily for me,
I'd got rid of my bots by then.
Quite funny.
Girl, go and get changed.
- Go. - Thank you
I was pretty naive,
because I had no clue what working for Facebook
would be like.
There is often a conflict between
the product side of companies,
whose goal is to grow the company,
and the integrity side of companies
whose goal is to protect the company from harm.
Instagram was more aggressively focused
on growing than Facebook.
Because Instagram has more room to grow.
This created a dynamic
in which there was more resistance
to integrity measures on Instagram
than I personally saw on Facebook.
Facebook is a public company, Instagram is part of it,
and Instagram needs to be the growth engine for Facebook -
to bring in as many young people as they can.
And it's becoming more and more important,
a bigger slice of that advertising every year.
When Instagram introduced advertising,
it was obviously better for people
to spend more time in the app,
because more time in the app means you see more ads.
And the single best way to get you to spend
more time in the app
is to make your feed more interesting.
One of the kind of trademarks of Instagram
when I first joined was that your feed
would be in chronological order.
But as the platform became more saturated,
what we were finding was that more and more people
weren't able to actually see a lot of the content
that they followed.
It became apparent that it would make more sense
and actually help users more to order their feed.
So that was rolled out.
- There was a team of machine learning engineers
who would evaluate the algorithm,
and they would compare these through A/B tests
to see which was performing better.
There was, amongst some users,
a negative perception of this.
However, if you looked at the metrics,
like our engagement metrics,
like, those were increasing.
Now you can kind of turn on any time
and get something different,
which I think for your brain, it's just this, like, candy
that it can't help but go back for.
It looks like a logical decision now
looking back, as to like why Instagram did it
as a business or, like,
why it at the time it looked good for users.
But it just completely changed obviously, like,
how it's being used
and what people get out of it.
And I think that's impossible to reverse.
There's a vast array of content
that you may never have discovered otherwise,
unless the algorithm recognises
something about your behaviour.
But at the same time,
depending on the nature of your interests,
the things that you might get shown
may or may not lead you down certain paths.
That can lead to some, I think,
both, like, scary places and also ones
that are not super, I guess, healthy.
- I'm Abby and I'm 17-years-old.
I live with my mum and my sister,
and all my dogs.
A good four years,
I've been associated with
these anti-recovery Instagram communities.
I probably wouldn't have known what self-harm was
if I didn't look on them accounts.
I knew how long I had to stay under water
to drown myself.
I knew how many paracetamol
I'd have to take to kill myself.
I knew how many minutes you'd have to have something
around your neck to...ligature.
You'd get added into groups
and people would tell us to go and kill myself,
and they'd want to do it together.
And they would want to come on a video call
to self-harm together,
which is just...corrupt.
The bullying started, like, year 7, year 8.
I was bullied all the way through school
for five years.
So when I was 14,
my school advised that I study at home,
due to my mental health deteriorating.
I had so much free time, like,
I was missing out six hours a day on education.
So sitting in front of your phone
for hours and hours a day,
I would make friends on Instagram.
There'd be these, like, accounts.
They'd put a sad quote and they would put it in
with like sad-toned music.
And they have, like, writing on it
about, like, how you're feeling.
So, then, you can relate to some of that,
so you like it and then...
If you let them,
then people often follow you if you like them.
And then you follow them.
And then you get sucked into that community.
- The kinds of problematic content
I remember being surprised by
were actually around things like self-harm.
Enough for you to be like, oh, actually,
people are using Instagram
in ways that, like, aren't, you know,
the sort of, like, nice vision
that we have for what it could be and should be.
I mean, just from the very earliest days
there was a way to report
offensive content in the app.
You could just tap any photo and say,
"Hey, I don't like this,
"this is not...this is not good."
And then we would actually have to review it.
We were actually a really tiny team.
We would have to, like, look at the photos,
which was never fun, block accounts.
So there was a little bit of hunting through
and just like being proactive and reactive
to the stuff that was happening.
Dealing with problematic content
was something that Facebook
was able to help quite a bit with, actually.
They've been running, you know,
a huge platform for many more years,
and have had to learn and deal with
those problems in much bigger numbers
than we ever had.
I remember that was actually one of the big benefits
that, like, we saw looking at Facebook.
Being, like, "Oh, wow."
Like, they can actually
really take this off our shoulders.
By offloading all of that community moderation
to Facebook,
Instagram detached themselves
from one of the most important aspects
of making sure that their platform was healthy.
Facebook's priority
is to have as few humans
involved in that process as possible.
And to prioritise the issues
that are getting the most public attention,
which are the issues mostly facing Facebook,
not the issues facing Instagram.
Content moderation happens
in a combination of different ways.
Some content moderation is what's called proactive,
where when content gets posted to the platform,
it gets flagged by an algorithm that says,
hey, this looks suspicious.
Either it's going to be removed from the platform
or it'll be sent, perhaps,
to some human to review it and say,
"Is this actually a problem?"
But algorithms are not perfect, right?
Algorithms often struggle to take into account
social nuances that might determine
whether something is problematic or not.
Even if you know your AI for detecting harmful content
is 99 percent accurate,
if people are posting a million bad things a day,
which is probably a vast underestimate,
getting one percent of them wrong
means 10,000 pieces of harmful content
are coming through the platform every day.
And people are going to be exposed to that.
I'm just packing my things
to go back to placement.
I stay at home on the weekend.
And then I stay there for the rest of the week
with like two staff,
'cause I've been poorly.
So I've got their support through the week.
End of year 10, year 11,
I started really wanting to hurt myself, and I would.
But I think apart from that, then,
like, before then I didn't really want to,
and I was just doing it because on Instagram
it's glamourised.
And it's meant to be, like, people make it look good.
Like everything on Instagram's glamourised,
whether it's the positive life
and going shopping,
having loads of money, or self-harm.
- We found her phone
and we got her password and stuff and then
when we looked into it, saw, like, the full extent
to it and messages.
"Aw, Abby, cut the cake, cut the cake, go on",
referencing to her self-harm.
It was upsetting.
Especially as well 'cause they're vulnerable.
And they've been through stuff like that,
and having to see what the effect
it has on them as well.
'Cause it's not just Abby who has that.
It's quite a lot of other people.
- I was quite shocked.
Naively, I was just thinking
that Abby was quite innocently on things.
- Later on, I could see, like,
she was just always on her phone
and when she had her phone
she seemed to be more heightened.
So that's when we came to realise, ah,
it's her phone that's doing it.
- You might have a low day,
a single low day,
and you might go and search for something on Instagram,
that you might not otherwise search for.
Suddenly, the algorithm has a little seed
it can start to grow.
And because that topic is so intense, you know,
as they show you more of it, you engage with it more.
A little tiny glimmer
and Instagram will pull you in that direction.
- A machine learning model predicts stuff,
and in particular, they predict behaviour.
Like think about the risk of using prediction
to rank things in terms of
a physical public square.
The whole square is controlled by one company.
There are thousands of possible routes
you can take through that square.
And when you come into the square,
the first thing that happens is you're handed
a particular leaflet,
and then how you react to that leaflet
determines which leaflet you're handed next.
Once you start down a particular route
through that square,
the leaflets that you see are going to be
more and more related to each other.
And that might be a good thing.
It might be that you get shown a cat leaflet
and you really like that cat leaflet,
so then you get shown more cat leaflets.
But it might also be a dangerous thing...
..that again, you find intriguing,
and then you're shown more of the same leaflet.
And that's the route you then take through the square.
What that means
is that you have to have the determination
to give the ranking model
the same signals consistently over time
that you are not in fact interested in that thing
that you were interested before.
And it'll test to see
if you're still not interested in them.
And if you say, actually, I am interested,
then it'll start showing that to you again.
Fundamentally we're habitual beings,
so it takes real will and resolve
to break the self-reinforcing dynamic
of using prediction to rank things.
It's not impossible,
but it asks a real, like, test of human psychology.
Betty? No.
- Have you got everything? - Yeah.
- It's hard to manage, it's a big problem.
Abby can get very distressed, you know,
she's been in hospital for three months.
And it is very, very hard.
I think there must be a way
that Instagram can monitor things
that are happening on there.
They must know
and possibly turn a blind eye...
Have you got all your things?
- Yeah. - Yeah?
..because it's happening every day.
It's happening every day to everyday kids.
And, you know, we are very lucky Abby is still here.
Give us a hug.
Right. I'll see you through the week,
- darling. - Alright.
- It's just the thought of everything
that she's been through, you know.
A lot of the people on there, Abby doesn't even know.
She's never met them.
Yeah, I mean she is, she's a strong girl,
and she will get there.
- One of the hardest things
when it comes to moderating Instagram
is the visual nature of the product.
The company simply hasn't figured out well
how to understand the dark corners of Instagram,
that are harder to look for
if you don't know what you're looking for.
The hashtag communities that exist.
If you don't know the right hashtag
you might never find them.
So, it's very easy for somebody
to be doing something that is harmful
and not coming to the attention
of anyone in Menlo Park, California.
- The people that were building
a lot of the social technologies were,
I don't want say similar to me,
but they were probably more similar to me than different.
And what I mean by that is that we were,
one, interested in technology.
Two, we were pretty literate and educated.
And we...I thought that
by bringing this technology to the world...
..a lot of things would just sort of sort themselves out.
I'm sure that there was some vague awareness,
perhaps, about that risk
in the early days of social media.
In some ways,
I don't want to say
we were, like, blinded by ambition,
but blinded by the desire
to just kind of get this stuff out there
and then we'd sort it out.
Part of this was a selection bias.
We were seeing people having a great time
and using these things for good.
And I think that, you know, at least for me,
propelled me to continue to believe
that bringing more access to more people was a net good
as opposed to just saying,
"OK, you know what? Humans aren't ready for this.
"Let's give it up."
What was really interesting
about the way Instagram solved its problems
is they focused on the biggest users first.
People like Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande,
they had such big follower counts
that they also got a bigger dose of the issues.
Taylor Swift was embroiled in a controversy
and people were posting a lot of snakes on her page
and she hated it.
She didn't want to have a platform
that was just full of harassment
every time she logged on.
And so that year,
Instagram decided to allow muting of any words or emoji
that you don't want to see.
Hiding the words in your comments
that make you sad.
Blocking certain people from following you.
Making sure that you can't see likes on those posts.
Well, hiding it doesn't make it go away.
You are still in this world
where everyone's being compared to everyone else,
and that is by its very nature anxiety-inducing.
What happens for some adults,
for some kids,
is that they self-soothe
by scrolling on Instagram.
The only problem is if your self-soothing technique,
you know, sitting and scrolling,
is exposing you to more of the content
that is making you sick,
that's not a good coping mechanism.
- Having an eating disorder,
it's really easy for you
to fall into...um,
it's kind of like a trigger hole.
Once I see one thing that's triggering,
it's kind of easy to then go and find things
that are also triggering,
just because that part of your brain likes it.
I get food pictures pop up
and they've got calorie counts on each side.
And it will say, like, which one is more healthy
or how you can swap out different foods
so that your calorie count is lower.
Being in a trigger hole
can have, like, serious effects
on what happens next in your life.
Like, I might see something
and then go and not eat dinner.
- In a sense, there is a feedback loop.
The algorithm shows you some things
that it thinks you're likely to interact with.
You may interact with those things,
and then it'll try to show you more of those things
as you interact with it more.
That feedback loop is reasonably well understood.
I think the aspect of it
that's a little harder to understand
is they will actually change your own behaviour over time
by showing you certain things.
- If I'm scrolling 13 hours a day,
it kind of...no wonder
that it had a negative effect on my mental health.
All the images would be quite highly edited.
I was, like, comparing myself
to this false person that I was looking at,
and not really realising that that's what I was doing.
I always used to use filters on Instagram,
and I didn't realise how damaging they were.
But I always used to put, like,
my pictures in Facetune
and, like, make my waist smaller
than what it was.
The underlying goal has always been the same.
How do I look best?
And maybe we need fewer, you know,
contrast filters and saturation filters
and all this stuff.
And, oh, take away my freckles
or take away my, like, wrinkles or something.
And how do you guarantee, like, a selfie to look good?
That was a problem we had to try and solve.
Making sure that, yeah,
when you took a photo, your skin looked good,
so all the blemishes go away.
Oh, wow. Um...
So, I have a two-year-old,
in 16 years when she's 18...
As a parent, I want to educate my daughter to say,
"You know what, it's OK.
"Beauty is up to you to define, to decide.
"It's not something that is defined by someone else."
You make people aware that there is a filter.
That's good,
because they know that there's some sense of,
like, this image has been doctored.
I think it's our responsibility
to...to tell people that.
- During COVID,
I made friends with a neighbour...
..and she'd been through
eating disorder recovery before,
she'd been an inpatient.
And she said, like,
"You're actually ill," like,
"You're ill, you need to get help".
Something just clicked and I was like...
"Yeah, I think actually, you're right."
And, yeah, I then got help from there.
Right, I'm filming now and I'm not stopping it.
I've stopped this video about 100 times.
Hi everyone, welcome back to my IGTV.
So, this week
is Eating Disorder Awareness Week,
if you didn't know already.
The content I post now is a lot more uplifting,
a lot more positive,
kind of still having that fashion element.
but I also now talk about healing.
When you look back
at your content from then, like,
what do you think about that girl?
- Um...
I feel like I have, like,
quite a lot of compassion for that girl.
Because I feel like she was, like,
striving to achieve this level of, like, perfection
that just was never going to happen.
But she also, like, worked so hard to, like,
get to where she was.
I'm getting upset.
Yeah...
When I look back at that girl I just think...
..I just wish that someone would have been, like,
"Hey, it's OK," like,
"there's something wrong here,
"but it's all going to be OK",
you know?
- I don't know if it's an unusual thing
about the nature of work as an influencer.
But there are no built-in protections.
You're competing with literally millions of people
on a scale that most humans
have never had to confront before.
Imagine constructing your world
such that you create things that happen
so you can take photos of them
in order for them to get likes.
So then you can get the validation
to stay at a certain rung on a ladder.
That if you stop doing that,
then you lose all of your self-worth,
and you'll start to question your value.
It's a really tough place to be in.
It's in the very structure of Instagram
that these problems have come about.
And so if you don't change that,
you really can't change the nature
of how people feel about being compared
to others all the time.
- My name's Callum,
I work for the Centre for Countering Digital Hate
as its Head of Research.
We've investigated a range of social media platforms.
We look at how their algorithms work
and what sort of content that they promote,
and whether they're profiting from things
that they shouldn't be.
A big part of Instagram's business model
is that it has an understanding
of what users are interested in.
And what it says to advertisers
is put your advertising on our platform
and we'll make sure it's shown to people
who are most likely to engage with this.
We set up an account to investigate
what's been called bigorexia,
and that's primarily men who become obsessed
with becoming very big and muscular,
obsessed with bodybuilding.
What we found was that the algorithm
would push bodybuilding content very, very hard
to accounts that began to follow that content.
To the extent that the Explore page on Instagram,
80 percent of the posts on there recommended to you
would feature pretty extreme bodybuilding physiques.
This has been likened to a form of body dysmorphia,
and increasingly is thought to be harmful.
And so the signs that the algorithm
is pushing men towards that content
and is encouraging them to see
this pretty extraordinary body shape
as ordinary, normal and easily attainable.
It was getting adverts for health supplements,
for diet plans, for workout plans.
So none of which is harmful in itself,
but it is another example of how Instagram
turns that time spent on the platform
looking at this content into money through advertising.
If you're Instagram, strategically,
the ordinary user doesn't matter
as much as the advertiser.
Unless you're thinking about them en masse.
They need more ordinary users
spending time on Instagram
to be the ones buying the products.
I mean, the most effective ads
and brand marketing
is content that makes you feel something,
that causes a reaction or a response.
Instagram was one of the first platforms
where I think that creator class
really realised that the best ads
are ads that don't feel like ads at all.
- So my natural body type is very slim.
And when I was younger skinny girls were in.
But when you came to Instagram now
the curvy girl was cool.
And then with the whole advertising of,
oh, Brazilian butt lift, BBL, you can do this,
you can do that.
And if you don't know what a BBL is,
they transfer fat from other areas of your body
and they pull it into your bum
and then they sculpt you.
I was thinking,
OK, curvy girls are in.
If I'm curvier I'm going to get more followers.
If I get more followers I'm going to get more money.
If I get more money
that's a better future for my children.
I'm Chenade Laroy and I'm out here in Istanbul,
and I've just had my BBL surgery,
hence why I'm a little bit stiff.
I got my BBL surgery done by a company.
They expected from me that I post stories
and post my results of before and after.
In return for that,
they would give me a reduced rate.
It turned out to be something I wouldn't do again.
- Hi. How are you, babe? - Hello!
- How are you? - Great, thanks.
Get some water if you like, some biscuits.
Yeah, definitely need some water.
After my surgery, when I came back to England,
my body was perfect.
And it was only when I was having my massages done,
one of the masseuses was like,
"I think you still have fluid left inside you."
Can you see like here?
It looks like I've got, like, a small baby.
And the thing is, like, people knew me on Instagram,
'cause I've always been into my health and fitness.
I've always had a six pack.
I did go onto my Instagram, put up a whole post.
I had a negative experience,
so I owe it to my audience to be honest and say,
"This is what happened to me."
You need to not fall into the hype like I did.
You need to actually think about the whole process.
It's one of the most dangerous procedures,
and obviously, like, I have two children.
It's very irresponsible of me,
especially being a mum.
But if I'm honest,
I feel like I probably still would've done it.
It's the advertising.
And like,
"Oh, but he looks good, and her body looks good."
And this is why, like, for me,
I had to go through my Instagram
and filter who I follow.
When it comes to the algorithm
that's where safety has to be paramount,
because that's where the platforms
take an active role in presenting content to users
and it can cause harm to them.
Yes, influencers have a responsibility
to their public, to their audience,
especially if they're younger people.
However, the government
and the people that actually run Instagram,
that's where the responsibility really falls.
If something is that detrimental,
you have the algorithms, you have the numbers.
You're seeing everything from the top.
They have to control it. They have to figure out.
It's not the case
that social media companies like Instagram
are just not thinking about all the ways
in which their content could harm people - they are.
They write rules which are publicly available,
and on the basis of those rules,
content is completely removed by people from the site.
But the other way they're thinking
about reducing content that's harmful to people
is by training machine learning models
to predict what kinds of content
meet certain definitions,
and then demote that on people's Instagram feeds.
But the crucial question about that -
and this is a question for society -
is who should get to decide?
What are the concepts
that we should train machine learning models
to demote content on the basis of?
Should that be the companies themselves?
Should it be legislators or regulators?
And how should we know what those concepts are?
'Cause right now,
we don't know all that much about them.
- What's going on, Abby?
Have a think of 10 different things
that are important or special about you
that nobody would know about unless you told them.
I'm living at home now,
so I've moved from my placement.
I didn't have my phone from my first placement.
I'd say about 14, 15 months, I didn't have my phone for.
They knew what was going on with social media,
stuff like that, so it was like,
"No, we're taking your phone off you,
"um, because it isn't making you any better,
"it's just making you worse".
Not having access to them groups
as such was very good,
like, still now I'm very grateful
that I didn't have my phone.
I'm not in them groups anymore.
If I get added, I'll leave.
And then look at her face when she turns.
- With Abby's phone and that it is a bit of a concern,
'cause you don't know whose on there,
who she's messaging.
So it makes you quite worried,
what she's doing by herself and on her phone.
- As soon as you open Instagram
it's the feed page you see
and not the group chats.
I went on Instagram, like, about two weeks ago
and there was someone posting, like,
a few screen recordings of these videos -
people committing suicide who'd videoed their suicides.
I don't know how them videos were uploaded.
I didn't really look into it,
'cause I was so traumatised.
And one of them there was this woman
and she was hanging herself
and she was crying and all this.
It's getting out of hand.
When I first went on the communities
it was like, yeah, people posting pictures
of self-harm and that but now it's, like...
I mean, that is bad in itself,
but now it's like extremes
and it's just getting, spiralling out of control.
And I think people can't control
what people put on anymore,
because they didn't stop it in the first place.
- Obviously, no social media would be the best solution,
but you can't take somebody's phone off them forever,
their social media off them forever.
So I think certain guidelines need to be put in place
to stop this harm towards people.
I don't think they really put a lot of safeguards in place,
so all it would be is sensitive warning
on this video.
All you have to do is click yes,
do you know what I mean?
It's not...it just shouldn't be up there,
that video should not be on social media.
- I think we're starting to have
a reckoning as a society
for the power that Instagram holds
over young people and over, really, all of us.
In the last few years,
employees have realised
that the power that this company holds
is simply too large, too important to keep secret.
- I worked at Facebook for approximately two years,
starting in June of 2019.
And it really struck me,
when I worked at Facebook,
that there were a number of systemic problems
that I didn't believe
Facebook could solve on its own.
Facebook's research says
that in the United States
six percent of teenagers
who thought about
suicidal ideation said that
it was driven by Instagram,
and 13 percent in the UK.
Instagram makes
body image issues worse
in one in three teen girls.
The documents describe an addict's narrative.
No, I don't feel good when I use this.
I can't stop.
I want to stop.
If I leave, I'll be ostracised.
And when they go to their parents
and talk about these problems,
because their parents never lived this experience,
Facebook's own documents say kids are suffering alone.
At some point I realised
that the only way these problems
were going to be solved
was if we stepped out of the frame.
Facebook is trying to solve these problems in private.
And that's part of why I came forward.
We have to solve these problems together.
Facebook and Instagram have a responsibility
to better understand the impacts
that they're having on the world.
But, in my mind, that's not enough.
What really needs to be part of the solution
is a much broader conversation with regulators,
with the public,
in terms of can we actually envision a world
where Facebook isn't just left alone
to do whatever it wants to its platforms?
But there's actually some way
that we have some transparency
into what they're doing.
And I think people are starting to realise that,
actually, there's a way that this could be done better.
- I'm literally a completely different person.
Every single thing is different about me now
because I've been through so much therapy.
My whole life has changed.
I've decided more recently to not edit any of my content.
So...
Oh, this is cute.
..I just have it straight from my iPhone camera
to Instagram,
not being touched.
I don't want to add to the problem,
that is probably never going to go away,
by showing people this false image of myself.
I feel a lot happier and healthier.
Like, I literally always smile...
..which I never really did before.
- I hope that we will be able to find ways
to feel interconnected in a positive way
that benefits society at large.
And I think that there are ways
that social media platforms can do that.
But they do need to change.
- Now I'm in college.
I'm doing my level three Health and Social Care,
so I can become a Mental Health nurse.
I think people need to take responsibility
for what they're posting
and acknowledge how it can impact others.
Instagram could try and monitor this
a lot more closely
and try and tackle this problem
as soon as possible.
I don't know, like, who is responsible.
I do think it will take us a while to kind of look back
and kind of figure that out.
Um, am I responsible?
Of course, I am.
I was part of designing features
and building features that are now used
in the way they are.
I can't completely disconnect from having worked on it.
I still love Instagram.
And I really hope
that it's able to sort of figure out
how to navigate this space
and get back to what it wanted to be.
But I can't say that I'm holding my breath
for that to happen.
The only way Facebook will change
is if they're forced to change.
Companies don't change until the cost of changing
is less than the cost of staying the same.
And so we need to stand up and demand better things.
We need to demand the Instagram that we deserve,
not the one that Facebook is giving us today.