How Facebook is Making Money on Your Eating Disorder
In a recent senate hearing, a Facebook whistleblower exposed tens of thousands of pages of internal research on the app's effects on children and urged Congress to take action against Facebook. The whistleblower, Frances Haugen, is a former Facebook product manager who worked with Facebook on civic integrity. In her congressional testimony, she claimed that Facebook continues to “harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy,” along with putting profit over moral responsibility. Research done by the company has shown that kids on the app struggle with body image and bullying issues. Many feel like they are struggling alone because their parents can not guide them in the new media age.
Facebook owns 91 other companies, including two major social media platforms Instagram and WhatsApp. Earlier this year, Facebook gave Instagram and Facebook users the option to hide public like counts on their posts. This was in an effort to minimize the pressure on users to gain popularity; however, Haugen argues that this effort is simply not enough. She states based on internal research, “as long as comments are allowed on Instagram, just taking likes off Instagram doesn’t fix the social comparison problem,” she continues “Teenage girls are smart, they see that Sally is prettier than them, her pictures are really good, she gets tons of comments, she doesn’t get many comments.” She’s completely right. With public like and comment counts, comparison is inevitable. But comparison is not the only issue young children are facing. The Facebook algorithm is feeding eating disorder content to anyone who wants it.
The Facebook algorithm is the algorithm that decides what posts will show up on your feed and the order in which they will be displayed. Facebook stated there is no single algorithm but “multiple layers of machine learning models and rankings built to predict which posts will be most valuable and meaningful to an individual over the long term.” This means every post on your Instagram and Facebook feed is carefully evaluated and scored based on how the algorithm predicts you will interact with the post. It then arranges the posts by the user's predicted interest in the content. So how does this relate to children and eating disorders? When young kids inevitably stumble upon eating disorder-related content, and when they interact with said content, the app will continue to curate and push similarly related content onto the user's feed. Eating disorders are a medical condition and a mental health condition, and social media not only creates an unrealistic perception of body image but also pushes pro-eating disorder content, including communities that share disorder tips and tricks to users. And Facebook is well aware of this. When asked by Senator Amy Klobuchar if Facebook’s algorithm is pushing “outrageous content” to promote eating disorders to young children. She replied that Facebook “knows it is leading young users'' to eating disorder-related content. In an interview with 60 Minutes, Haugen states, “As these young women begin to consume this eating disorder content, they get more and more depressed, it makes them use the app more. And so they end up in this feedback cycle where they hate their bodies more and more.” Facebook makes 98% of its revenue from advertising, meaning the more time you spend on the app, the more money Facebook makes. And with Facebook making 86 billion dollars in 2020, your time is worth a lot of money.
The problems with Facebook have been around since its creation. Facebook creator, Mark Zuckerberg, based the app on a website called Facemash he created while in college. Facemash was a website where Harvard students could rank uploaded headshots of their female peers based on how “hot” they were. Zuckerberg created and ran this website and has even claimed he would extend Facemash to comparisons of zoo animals and the uploaded headshots. Zuckerberg's response to Haugen’s testimony was, “We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being, and mental health” But with the release of these new studies, it has been made obvious Facebook values profit over people. Frances Haugen has provided Congress with overwhelming evidence that Facebook has knowingly been harming its users. It’s now up to Congress to make the necessary changes and regulations to address these issues. Haugen also urged schools and the National Institute of Health to provide adequate information to parents so they can learn how to better support their kids in dealing with the potential consequences and effects of social media.
