Instagram is killing people.
I have officially heard too many statistics pointing toward Instagram being intrinsically linked to increased suicide rates (particularly among teenage girls) to fathom it continuing in its current state any longer. The research is there, and it's damning. I don't know what else to say. Many have always anecdotally believed this, but having the data to back it up adds an even greater urgency to address Instagram, likely the single most important contributing factor in our country's current mental health crisis.
In my mind, or at least what exists of my mind at 11:30 pm, this detox primarily takes the form of two key changes. The first is removing the ability to like a post altogether. We have proven it cannot exist without fostering a culture of comparison. It's time to take it behind the barn and shoot it. The second would be deprioritizing the comment feature and directing users towards a more robust DM feature for people to talk about content on a one-on-one level. I think this shifts the tone of the site from a public forum for critiquing things to a more intimate environment for discussing content, and only with people you realistically want to have a one-on-one chat with (or the occasional stranger that isn’t just trolling).
I acknowledge that making these two changes is fundamentally changing the two primary ways people engage on that platform, but that's sort of the point. These interactions are clearly unhealthy, and I think it's the medium as a whole that is wrong rather than just the execution.
I think making these changes would allow Instagram to transition from a platform where we interact with content very transactionally to one with a now greater emphasis on creating content, not just publicly judging it. I have said here before that my relationship with social media got drastically better when I started sharing what I enjoy rather than what I thought my followers would enjoy, and I think making these changes and letting Instagram grow into a more creativity-centric platform like Pinterest or VSCO would be great.
But even if the proper long-term solution still needs to be developed, we at the very least need a robust stopgap to get us through the next decade with, quite honestly, as few social media-related suicides as possible.
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