An Instagram Investigation

The evidence that smartphones damage children’s mental health has continued to grow in recent years.

Feelings of loneliness and sadness began rising more than a decade ago, around the same time that smartphones and then social media became ubiquitous. The amount of time that teenagers spend socializing in person has declined on the same timeline. So has the number of hours they sleep.

Academic research points in a similar direction. Many studies have found a correlation between the amount of time that teens — especially girls — spend on smartphones and the likelihood that they will be depressed or have low self-esteem. One study last year found a striking relationship between the age at which somebody first owned a smartphone and that person’s mental health as a young adult:

There is still much that researchers don’t understand about digital technology, and some smartphone use is clearly necessary and healthy. But the notion that smartphones are beneficial or harmless to mental health on the whole — an argument that technology executives sometimes make — looks much weaker than it once did.

Two of my colleagues, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries and Michael H. Keller, have published a new investigation into an extreme example of the problems that social media can cause for children. Their article examines Instagram accounts that parents operate for their young daughters, often in the hope of turning the girls into influencers or models. Many of these accounts have attracted a following from men who acknowledge on other platforms that they are sexually attracted to children.

As Jennifer and Michael write:

Thousands of accounts examined by The Times offer disturbing insights into how social media is reshaping childhood, especially for girls, with direct parental encouragement and involvement. Some parents are the driving force behind the sale of photos, exclusive chat sessions and even the girls’ worn leotards and cheer outfits to mostly unknown followers. The most devoted customers spend thousands of dollars nurturing the underage relationships. …

Interacting with the men opens the door to abuse. Some flatter, bully and blackmail girls and their parents to get racier and racier images. The Times monitored separate exchanges on Telegram, the messaging app, where men openly fantasize about sexually abusing the children they follow on Instagram and extol the platform for making the images so readily available.

Obviously, many parents post photos of their young children in harmless ways — so that family and friends can stay updated. But Jennifer and Michael’s article avoided focusing on these instances by examining only accounts that had at least 500 followers and posted multiple images of children in form-fitting or revealing attire.

Takeaways

Among the article’s key points:

• Some children charge monthly subscriptions to their images and earn six-figure incomes.

• “With the wisdom and knowledge I have now, if I could go back, I definitely wouldn’t do it,” one parent said. “I’ve been stupidly, naïvely, feeding a pack of monsters, and the regret is huge.”

• The Times found men who used children’s Instagram pages to satisfy their fantasies and who exchanged information about parents considered receptive to selling “private sets” of images.

• An internal study at Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, run by Mark Zuckerberg — found that 500,000 child Instagram accounts had “inappropriate” interactions every day, court records show.

• Meta failed to act even after receiving multiple reports from parents of worrisome behavior. Instead, the company sometimes restricted parents who tried to block many followers. Former Meta employees described the company as overwhelmed by the problem despite having known about it for years.

• A Meta spokesman disputed the suggestion that the company’s safety and security efforts were underfunded, saying that 40,000 employees worked on them. He also said that Meta reported more suspected child abuse imagery to the authorities each year than any other company.

• “The Bible says, ‘The wealth of the wicked is laid up for the righteous,’” said the owner of a small clothing company who features young influencers in his online marketing. “So sometimes you got to use the things of this world to get you to where you need to be, as long as it’s not harming anybody.”

You can read the investigation here.

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