Title: How Social Media Is Affecting Our Mental Health, According to Top Experts | Vogue
Headings: ‘The Social Dilemma’: Are Facebook and Instagram Really Affecting Our Mental Health?
‘The Social Dilemma’: Are Facebook and Instagram Really Affecting Our Mental Health?
Fear of the Unknown
Digital Dependency
Nature vs. Nurture
Remaining in Control

Content: 20 minutes chatting with friends on Facebook Messenger is not the same as 20 minutes looking at distressing content. Photo: Paul won Jeong
Nature vs. Nurture
One of the most worrying effects of social media, as outlined in The Social Dilemma, is its negative impact on our body image. Research is relatively consistent in finding a correlation between this and social media, especially when consuming and engaging with appearance-focused content that promotes narrow societal beauty standards. In the documentary, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt highlights a strong correlation between the negative mental health of teenage girls and the adoption of smartphones. But as Nadia Craddock, research fellow at the Centre for Appearance Research, argues, “the relationship really depends on the content we engage with and how we feel about our body before we use social media.” Which is to say, if you’re already predisposed to worrying about how you look—a result of genetics and social-environmental factors—staring at images of yourself and comparing them to curated influencer feeds is bound to exacerbate these anxieties. Furthermore, given the nature of algorithms, the more you visit these feeds, the more the platforms will recommend more of the same feeds to you. This leads to an echo-chamber effect, where we constantly compare ourselves to our news feeds of filtered influencers, thinking this is what everyone else in the world looks like. In actuality, we are just stuck in an algorithm designed to show us what it thinks we’ll be interested in—and without anyone there to regulate it.