The vulnerability of our children should curb the lowest instincts of those responsible for social networks.
Posted on January 16
However, the opposite is happening.
The Instagrams, Facebooks, YouTubes of this world behave like predators exploiting this vulnerability. It is still too often sacrificed on the altar of profit.
The most recent scandalous revelations in this area concern the rising star of social networks, TikTok, a subsidiary of the Chinese company ByteDance.
A survey of wall street journal published in mid-December demonstrated that this social network “floods the teenagers who use it with videos of rapid weight loss contests and methods to make food purges which, according to health professionals, contribute to a wave eating disorder issues.
To prove it, the journalists created a dozen accounts pretending to be 13-year-old users.
They first showed interest in some videos about weight loss.
Then, quickly, they were treated to a veritable tsunami.
We’re talking about “tens of thousands of videos” over the course of a few weeks, many of which normalized eating disorders.
One of the videos featured “The Corpse Bride Diet”.
In another, they humiliated those who put an end to their efforts to lose weight.
Still others offered all sorts of dumb tips for losing weight, including eating less than 300 calories a day.
“I have already heard a patient tell me that she eats raw pork in order to catch a solitary worm, because a TikTok video advised to do it to lose weight”, told the psychiatrist Xavier Pommereau daily Le Figaro last fall, even before the publication of the survey by the wall street journal.
It is TikTok’s algorithm, considered to be of formidable power to discern the interests of users, which is at the source of this toxic overflow.
These videos do not have the same effect on the mental health of young people as dancing or chatting videos, which can also be offered to young people by the thousands. But the investigation of wall street journal seems to indicate that, for TikTok’s algorithm, it’s pretty much the same thing.
All of this is obviously part of a strategy aimed at preventing young people from dropping out of the network. To create a real addiction.
Let’s be clear: the Internet has long been a real trap for anyone with eating disorders.
“Places where you can find tips for losing more weight have always existed on the Internet,” explained Isabelle Thibault, from the Department of Psychoeducation at the University of Sherbrooke.
“On the other hand, what is different and particular is that an algorithm ensures that adolescent girls are much more exposed and lose control of this exposure. That’s what scares me,” she adds.
The head of the Eating Disorders Program at the Douglas Institute (of the CIUSSS de l’Ouest-de-l’Île-de-Montréal), Howard Steiger, confirms these fears.
“I know that our patients are often drawn to it and find it hard to resist,” he explains about the toxic content relayed by social networks.
Because the shocking discoveries of wall street journal about TikTok are not the exception that proves the rule. They are similar to those made, a few months earlier, about Instagram.
Journalists from the same daily were then able to explore internal Facebook documents thanks to a former social network engineer, whistleblower Frances Haugen.
In particular, we learned that studies had been carried out by Facebook to assess the effect of Instagram on adolescents. And the results were disturbing and disturbing.
“We make one in three teenagers’ relationship to their body worse,” the research concluded in 2019. They also showed that “teens accuse Instagram of increasing levels of anxiety and depression.”
All these revelations of course only concern part of the harm caused by social networks, but they have a particular resonance since the beginning of the pandemic, because the psychological distress of young people has increased dramatically (as indeed the time passed in front of the screens).
Cases of eating disorders, in particular, have exploded due to the health crisis. It is difficult to assess very precisely the role played by social networks in this phenomenon, but it is certainly not negligible.
“There is scientific literature that very clearly shows that the use of social media is considered an important risk factor for the development of eating disorders,” explained Howard Steiger.
But in this case, as in many others (the shameless harvesting of our data for profit, large-scale disinformation, the promotion of intolerance and hatred, etc.), our governments are still reluctant to crack down.
It will be necessary, however, that they one day have the courage to make the many gestures which are essential to discipline the digital giants.