In fact, adolescent and young adult Instagram users more often engage in browsing through and “liking” the content on others’ profiles.

Yet, posting is not the most prevalent activity on Instagram. The main reason behind self-presentation is the wish to receive attention for their posts, especially from peers. Among female adolescents and young women, self-presentation focuses to a great extent on physical aspects and the idea of beauty. In an interview study with 24 teenage girls, Chua and Chang found that, in order to please their followers, social media users tend to match anticipated expectations and preferences by presenting a “highly selective version of themselves” (p.

Since Instagram provides its users with the opportunity to edit their content before posting it on their profiles, users tend to resort to self-presentation behaviors. Physical appearance, in fact, plays an important role on Instagram, and studies have found that adolescents and young people experience distress, are dissatisfied with their bodies, and feel the pressure to look perfect on social media, especially when confronted with thin ideals. Instagram includes a plethora of (seemingly) authentic pictures, and many of them represent body ideals. In particular, the study considered (1) different types of Instagram use (i.e., browsing, commenting, posting), (2) the mechanism through upward social comparison, and (3) the role of close and distant peers as well as social media influencers as comparison targets.ġ.1. The current study was designed to investigate the relationship between Instagram use and body dissatisfaction among female adolescents and young women.

Recent research also considered Instagram influencers, focusing on adult women. Prior studies on the link between Instagram use and women’s body dissatisfaction mainly focused on social comparison behaviors with peers and specific features such as the role of “selfies” or the number of “likes”. Since Instagram content is characterized by a positivity bias, where users generally present an idealized image of themselves, researchers have suggested even before the publication of the Facebook Files that Instagram may be more detrimental to women’s body image than any other social media platform, such as Facebook, which presents more varied content. On Instagram, users not only interact with peers, but also follow celebrities and social media influencers. The platform is mainly used for sharing photos, videos, and stories that people can edit by applying filters or other creative tools before they post them on their accounts. As of October 2021, 3.7% of its users were females aged 13–17, whereas 13.1% were women between the ages of 18 and 24 years old. Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms among the younger population, especially female adolescents and young women. In September 2021, the Wall Street Journal published the Facebook Files, uncovering that the platform owner conducted their own research and found that Instagram is making body issues worse for one in three teenage girls, mainly because Instagram contributes to unhealthy social comparison among teens. Conclusions: Our findings highlight the need for public health interventions to raise awareness about the posting practices of social media influencers and to strengthen a positive body image among young females susceptible to social comparison processes.

Being an adolescent female (compared to a young woman) and having a higher BMI were associated with worse body appreciation. Commenting on others’ looks and posting own content were not associated with body dissatisfaction. Results: Our final model results show that browsing on Instagram was associated with lower levels of body appreciation, fully mediated by upward social comparison with social media influencers, not close or distant peers. Methods: We applied structural equation modeling to self-report cross-sectional data collected from 291 female adolescents and young women (M age = 19.8, SD = 4.6 94.8% Italian). In the present study, we tested a mediation model linking Instagram use (i.e., browsing through others’ profiles, commenting on others’ looks, posting one’s own photos or stories) to body dissatisfaction (i.e., body image discrepancy and lack of body appreciation), mediated by upward social comparison with close peers, distant peers, and social media influencers. Idealized body images shared on the platform have been associated with lower levels of body satisfaction in this population, likely due to social comparison processes. Background: Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms among young females.

Instagram issues