Sen. Richard Blumenthal.Photo: Tom Brenner-Pool/Getty
A quick glance at Sen. Richard Blumenthal’sverified Instagramaccount shows he knows how to take a selfie. But to find out what it’s like for a 13-year-old girl to use the social media app, he and his staff created a fake account and posed as one.
Blumenthal’s office conducted the research ahead of a hearing Thursday in order to examine the “toxic effects of Facebook and Instagram” on young people.
With the fake account, Blumenthal’s team “followed a few easily findable accounts associated with extreme dieting and eating disorders,” hesaid at the hearing. “Within a day its recommendations were exclusively filled with accounts that promotes self-injury and eating disorders. That is the perfect storm that Instagram has fostered and created.”
“Instagram’s recommendations will still latch on to a person’s insecurities, a young woman’s vulnerabilities about their bodies, and drag them into dark places that glorify eating disorders and self-harm,” he said.
TheJournalsaid it obtained research from Facebook that indicated “teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression” and “thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.”
Antigone Davis.Patrick Semansky/AP/Bloomberg via Getty
Blumenthal asked Davis if she sees this as a problem.
“As long as there’s one person dealing with the issue on our platform, we consider it a problem,” she replied.
She also explained ideas the company is considering to mitigate it. “We’re looking at nudges towards uplifting content,” she said. “We’re also looking at something called ‘take a break,’ where we would encourage somebody to take a break when we think they may be rabbit holing down certain kind of content or on the app too long.”
The questioning that got the most attention, however, was when Blumenthal asked Davis, “Will you commit to ending Finsta?”
Davis took a pause before answering.
“Senator, again let me explain, we don’t actually do Finsta,” she said in a moment that went viral (video of the exchange has millions of views online). “What Finsta refers to is young people setting up accounts where they may want to have more privacy.”
More broadly, “Finsta” is a term for a fake Instagram account that some users set up in secret to control who sees the content they’re posting there.
“Finsta is one of your products or services,” the senator continued. “We’re not talking about Google or Apple, it’s Facebook, correct?”
“Finsta is slang for a type of account,” Davis said, “it’s not a product.”
As the hearing ended, Blumenthal made it clear that he would like Facebook to end those types of accounts.
source: people.com
