What exactly are we talking about here? Say you’re a 13-year-old girl who is beginning to feel anxious about your appearance, who has followed some diet influencers online. Instagram’s algorithm might suggest more extreme dieting accounts with names such as “Eternally starved,” “I have to be thin” and “I want to be perfect.” …“As these young women begin to consume this eating disorder content, they get more and more depressed,” she said. “It actually makes them use the app more. And so they end up in this feedback cycle where they hate their bodies more and more.”…

Mark Zuckerberg participated in the ritual of ranking girls too. When he was experimenting before building Facebook, as a student at Harvard, he put his female classmates’ photos on his now-notorious “Facemash” website, where students could rank and compare the students’ headshots based on how hot they were. He wrote at the time, “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.”…

Many of these messages are conveyed under the guise of health or wellness, but Facebook’s leaked research suggests that this charade does less to promote health than to damage it. No school health class or parental reassurance is a match for the might of these powerful tech platforms, combined with entire industries that prey on girls’ insecurities. Girls themselves often know Instagram is not good for them, but they keep coming back.

That’s because social media is addictive. Writing in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson called it “attention alcohol,” explaining, “Like booze, social media seems to offer an intoxicating cocktail of dopamine, disorientation, and, for some, dependency.” We are supposed to protect minors from products like this, not dish it out.

…

But more telling than what Silicon Valley parents say is what they do. Many of them have long known that technology can be harmful: That’s why they’ve often banned their own children from using it.

Ultimately, Instagram is just a vicious messenger. But the cesspool of content fueling it? That comes from us.

Fill Op Ed Here in NYT

Well it may be easy to shift the blame to parents, but as a parent, it is wrong footed. You can try to keep kids screen time down, but he influence creeps in sideways via peers. We always had peers growing up, but never the turbo charged razor targeted advertising that spills out of big tech.