Vulnerable teens who reported feeling bad about their bodies saw significantly more “eating disorder adjacent” content on Instagram, according to a new report citing internal research from Meta.
The teens saw body-focused content with “prominent” displays of chest, buttocks or thighs; judgements and comparisons of different body shapes; and content related to disordered eating and negative body image, the research obtained by Reuters found.
Some of the content was so explicit – like images of skinny women in lingerie, a woman’s lacerated neck and a drawing of a crying figure with phrases like “how could I ever compare” and “make it all end” – that researchers included a “sensitive content” label for Meta staffers, according to the report.
Yet the images do not violate Instagram’s guidelines and are allowed on the platform. Some of the 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, along with expert consultation, help drive the meaningful changes we’ve made to our platforms for teens and parents,” a Meta spokesman told The Post.
He nodded to changes made last year – when the internal research was conducted – to put teen accounts into more restrictive content settings by default.
Meta announced last week that teen accounts on Instagram will be guided by PG-13 ratings to deliver safe, age-appropriate content to users.
The research in the new report took place 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 the 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” accounted for 10.5% of what they saw on the platform. Such content only made up 3.3% of what other teens saw on Instagram, according to the report.
“Teens who reported frequent body dissatisfaction after viewing posts on Instagram … saw about three times more body-focused/[eating disorder]-adjacent content than other teens,” the 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 that fell under troublesome categories like “Mature Themes,” “Risky Behavior,” “Harm & Cruelty” and “Suffering,” according to the research.
The provocative content accounted for 27% of all posts viewed by these teens on the platform – compared to just 13.6% for peers who did not report feeling bad after using Instagram.
Researchers noted it “is not possible to establish the causal direction of these findings,” explaining that teens who feel bad about themselves could be actively seeking out inappropriate content.
However, teens, parents, pediatricians, outside experts and Meta’s own advisors have urged the platform to limit how much fitness and beauty content it shows teen users, according to Meta’s report.
Meta said its existing content restriction tools were incapable of detecting 98.5% of the “sensitive” content that might be inappropriate for teens, the report stated.
But this finding was “not necessarily surprising,” since Meta had yet to implement its latest algorithm to detect the potentially harmful content, researchers wrote in the study.
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