BRUNO TOLEDANO
@BrunoLouviers
Madrid
ILLUSTRATION: JOSETXU L. PIÑEIRO
@nunhapedra
Updated on Thursday, 16September2021-02: 03
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Why technologies are the new tobacco.
"They are addictive and damage our health"
The story that is hidden on Instagram.
In 10 years it has attracted 1,000 million users and led to the triumph of ego-capitalism
"We aggravate the body image problems of one in three adolescent women."
That was how forceful was one of the main conclusions reached by a
report by Instagram about its influence on young girls
.
In other words, the social network is especially harmful precisely for those who use it most frequently.
The investigation was carried out throughout 2019 and 2020. Then, it was handed over to the most important executives of Facebook, the company that moves the threads in the social network of photos with comments, who
decided to keep this data secret in instead of acting.
However, the documents have been obtained by
The Wall Street Journal
and their publication has provoked an avalanche of criticism against the company directed by Mark Zuckerberg.
Not for less, because the report's findings leave Instagram in a very bad place. "Adolescents blame Instagram for the increase in their anxiety and depression," says the secret document, where it is reflected that
13% of British users and 6% of Americans blame the social network for their suicidal thoughts
. And he concludes: "The girls tell us that they don't like the amount of time they spend in the
app
, but they feel like they have to appear there."
It seems logical that a social network where celebrities,
influencers
, athletes and the rich in general show off their body and their lifestyle
damages the self
-
esteem
of some users, who usually do not have dietitians or time to do as much sport as they do.
What is surprising is the naturalness with which Facebook assumes the situation without doing anything.
And if he does anything, it is lie about it.
Last March, Zuckerberg told the US Congress the following: "
Using social networks to connect with other people can have mental health benefits
.
"
Needless to say, when he made such a statement, the Facebook CEO was already aware of the report that has now seen the light of day.
It is not risky to assume that Zuckerberg was also aware of as many third-party reports that they reached conclusions similar to his. For example, the Pew Research Center in the United States said in 2018 that 45% of young people are "overtaken" by the networks and that
they feel obliged to upload content that makes them look good to others
. Meanwhile, the University of Cambridge, in collaboration with UK social services, noted in a 2020 study that "young people who spend more than two hours a day on social media [..] are
more likely to suffer from health problems mental
'.
Instagram is precisely the great social network for young people.
40% of its users do not reach the age of 22
, something that contrasts with the increasingly aging population - and therefore less interesting for
advertising
- of Facebook. But admitting that your product harms users' mental health would harm your business model. Hence, instead of mitigating these effects, its strategy has been to redouble its efforts to reach an increasingly young population.
It's also not fair to just blame Facebook for something that is common among Silicon Valley's big tech companies.
They all prefer to apologize to ask permission and their usual way of apologizing is to pay millionaire fines
. For example, Google paid 5,000 million to the EU in 2018 for unfair competition, a million that pales next to the 137,000 million that entered that year.
The impunity with which these companies operate has even been reported by their own employees. The famous documentary
The Network Dilemma
(Netflix, 2020) has already made it clear that the employees who create these tools, functions and new services know what they are doing. For example,
Tim Kendall
, inventor of the
Like
button
, knew he was going to create addicts. "
We follow the manual of the big tobacco companies
,
working so that our offer is addictive from the beginning,
" said the former head of monetization on Facebook.
The list of bounces is extensive and it is common to read cases like
Tim Bray
, vice president of Amazon Web Services, who left his position after seeing how other employees were fired for pointing out problems within the company.
"Staying in my position would have meant agreeing to actions I despised, so I resigned," he blogged in 2020.
Conclusion: technology companies develop services and tools that can be useful and entertaining, but whose impact on consumers is not clear.
When your own employees set off alarms, no one listens to them.
And when they are caught
red-handed
by the authorities, they face fines in amounts that are insufficient to deter them.
There were also 5,000 million that Facebook paid for the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which came to show that practically anyone could manipulate the users of the social network for very clear
political purposes
. Again, a trifle: the company made $ 85 billion in 2020.
Thus, it is not surprising that, when they are forced to take action, they are insufficient.
For example,
Instagram has required since July that the accounts of those under 16 years of age are always private.
However, they do not limit the number of hours
they can spend connected or the accounts they can follow, because they would lose huge amounts of money.
We would talk about 20,000 million because, in another example of opacity, Facebook does not make public how much it earns per year thanks to Instagram.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more
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