With more than 500 million users, Instagram has become the home for visual storytelling for celebrities, brands, teens, musicians, and pretty much anyone with a camera to capture and share the world’s moments.
Back in the day Instagram was mainly used to post pictures of yourself or your perfectly brewed cup of coffee and to tag your friends in an endless stream of funny or interesting posts. Nowadays, the platform is widely used to inspire the crowd. Popular pages include people showing how to do your make-up perfectly, how to loose weight and show pictures of well-known models. The result? Instagram is turning into a platform facilitating vanity, through an overwhelming amount of pictures of seemingly perfect lifestyles and toned body’s.
U could imagine the impact of these shared moments on users with confidence and/or mental health problems. The amount of ‘ selfharming’ hash tags (e.g. #cutting, #selfharm, #thinspiration) will give you thousands of pictures of everything you can imagine and beyond, giving self-destructive behaviour a platform rather than the happy and interesting moments in our day-to-day life. With over 350 million people of all ages suffering from depression, this is not something to ignore.
Instagram recently acknowledged its responsibility towards the wellbeing of users and visitors of the platform and has come up with a new feature, to tackle this increasing problem within its community. The new feature will allow users to anonymously flag a photo when they think the person that posted it needs help. When flagged, the person will receive an automatically generated message, which states “Someone saw one of your posts and thinks you might be going through a difficult time. If you need support, we’d like to help”. After which the user can choose between a couple of options. Chief Operating Officer Marne Levine says that the tool is designed to let you know that you are surrounded by a community that cares about you, at a moment when you might most need that reminder.
In addition, specific tags associated self-harming acts, have been banned of the platform, discouraging the community to post pictures regarding these topics.
It’s great to see how a popular platform like Instagram is using its power to help people dealing with depressions or low self-esteem issues, rather than only focus on reach and popularity. Personally, I hope that other platforms will follow and start acknowledging their role in helping their users around the world.
1http://hellogiggles.com/instagrams-new-feature-mental-health/
2http://www.lindanieuws.nl/nieuws/meer-dan-filter-instagram-biedt-nu-ook-psychische-hulp/
3https://www.instagram.com/about/us/