Engineering Mental Illnesses: Meta’s Deadly War on Teen Girls And The New Breed of Digital Weapons
We know these facts about Meta:
- It makes teens feel worse about themselves
- It makes teens feel more isolated and alone
- It makes teens feel more depressed and anxious
- It results in extreme bullying on incalculable scales
- It is a platform of widespread pedophilic activity
- It “contributes to” (causes) eating disorders
- It “contributes to” (causes) body dysmorphic disorder
- It makes teens more likely to kill themselves (aka, causes suicide)
Meta’s flagship products, Instagram and Facebook, have been found, in study after study, in research they themselves have published and that has been leaked, and in the lived experience of teen girls around the globe — to over and over and over, inflict massive emotional distress and damage on teen girls.
This has a fucking body count, okay. 17% of teen girls say Instagram makes eating disorders worse — and eating disorders are deadly. 6% of suicidal teens have said that Instagram is the cause of their suicidality; in leaked documents, 13.5% of teen girls report that Instagram accelerates “thoughts of suicide”. Just overall, we’ve seen an alarming increase in suicide by teen girls… pretty much ever since technology came widely into youth use. Other researchers have looked at the data and similarly concluded that the only reasonable explanation for the increase is technology; from 2007-2015 rates of suicide actually doubled. (Instagram was introduced in 2010, just as a data point.) And the number of teen girls with suicide attempts increased by 50% between 2019 and 2021. While the pandemic is certainly a factor in that statistic, you have to wonder how much this would correlate with use of social media increasing during that time period, especially because it is very consistent with the ongoing increases in youth suicide that has been going on for 15 years.
Allllll of this, all of the horrible horrible this, is taken, societally, as par for the course — of course it makes teen girls feel terrible!!! That’s just the way it goes in this modern age with all these new apps and gadgets!!! Teenage girls have always been this insecure!! But have they? We haven’t had teen girls who were raised without Meta since the 1990s and early aughts, so who can really tell?
It is casually stated in the media every few months that they’ve found yet another ghastly effect of Meta products on teen girls. That they’re getting bullied and committing suicide. That they feel worse about themselves, that they become addicted to social media and it leads to an out of control self-esteem spiral. The most recent one? Revelations that Meta causes girls to have *body dysmorphia,* an incredibly severe and potentially deadly mental illness. This is far past just making girls feel self-conscious, this is about actually inducing deep pathologies and potentially life-long mental illnesses in an incredibly formative period.
Meta has been perhaps one of the greatest singular dangers to teenage girls for 18 years. It cannot be stated enough that Facebook was started on a college campus, as a “Hot or Not” exercise: two pictures of girls on the campus, used non-consensually, set up side by side, for the male students to vote on. You’ll find that that is the #1 goal of all Meta products: to enable and perpetuate violence and abuse against teen girls, and use them to drive adoption and profit.
My assertion is that these negative effects on teen girls cannot be understood at all within the context of some feature of an algorithm, but rather that hurting teen girls is really the foundation of Meta’s business model, and thus, the remedy is not to agitate for code changes (a huge distraction) but for Facebook to be dismantled.
Facebook itself was started at Harvard, where, to this day, over 30% of female students are sexually assaulted each year. I couldn’t find how that specifically broke down into rape cases, but for comparison, MIT has voluntarily published findings demonstrating 5% of women undergraduates had been raped at the college. Teen boys in high school and college are one of the biggest dangers to teen girls. So Facebook was launched in a very specific context of significant violence towards young women, and replicated that violence digitally. Facebook was an embodiment of dangerous college misogyny and sexual abuse, and was unleashed on groups of women who were being sexually assaulted and raped already, at extremely high rates.
Meta products are now pretty much the same thing as it was then, a matter of looking at women and consuming women and girls and causing them various forms of humiliation, exploitation and abuse. Most views and usage of the platform is driven by people looking at women, and always has been. This of course came to new heights when Meta acquired Instagram, even MORE based on people looking at women than Facebook. “If it’s free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product” is a popular saying around the Valley. But that’s not true: women are the actual product — not all users. Specifically women. And specifically teen girls.
We need to dramatically re-visit how we are talking about this and how we locate this in a framework that can result in material action. In discussions about Meta products and their effect on teen girls, there is this idea that this is an “unintended consequence” and “an example of move fast, break things” gone awry. Even the “Facebook whistleblower” has described all of this as unintentional, has defended Facebook as not PURPOSEFULLY doing this, that they don’t set out to hurt young girls, but rather, this is about balance and thoughtfulness in the algorithm, and, very specifically, a particular property of it (its engagement ranking). This is taking something that is very very material — dead girls from suicide and eating disorders, and making it about… the most narrow possible implementation detail of a very, very complex technical implementation. Meta has fucking 30,000 engineers, okay.
In a recent interview with some blog site for mothers, the “Facebook Whistleblower” said: “Its not like the AI is saying: we want your child to have an eating disorder, it just learns that people who are interested in healthy eating seem to be drawn to this content if we show it to them.” This is an incredibly dangerous technical AND business framing for this — it provides what seems to be on the face a reasonable explanation for the phenomenon, an “unintended consequence” of product decisions. She goes on to specify several more times that this isn’t the platform’s intention, that this isn’t about Facebook making literal business choices, though it CLEARLY is. This has been the most effective strategy in diffusing resistance to tech companies: going far, far from the material reality and landing us in vague issues like “algorithmic bias” and “engagement-focused AIs,” where people can be clout chasers and influencers and bootlickers “analyzing” them in the blogosphere. This fundamentally posits that these things have no connection to the business itself, and rather locates what is a very, very, serious phenomenon, with a death toll, into one property of one feature of one algorithm in the vast Meta portfolio and technical sea.
Oh, okay. (This is why I think the Facebook whistleblower is an op).
Facebook has 30,000 motherfucking engineers, and is processing just massive amounts of the most coveted data in the world, regularly, using its huge legion of computer scientists, the best in the world, and its own advanced tools, including AI, for crunching the data. The idea that there are *any* ephemeral effects as opposed to these being very direct results from very specific and known policy, is ludicrous. Of course they know!!! You think a phenomenon like more teens killing themselves isn’t going to pop up on the radar of a technical infrastructure intent on tracking, storing, analyzing and weaponizing the tiniest personal detail you possess, and of everyone in the entire world? LMFAO LMFAO LMFAO
No, this is happening because hurting teen girls is the actual business model of these sites. “Unintended effects of technology” is one of the biggest fucking lies IN the computing space, straight up.
But you know what is truly disturbing? The fact that we categorically accept that teen girls will be the mass casualties of social media platforms that are driving truly unprecedented wealth for primarily White and Asian adult men. What in the actual fuck.
Do people understand what body dysmorphia is? Body dysmorphia is a life-threatening and potentially permanent condition, and it is an utter hell for sufferers. People with body dysmorphia become compulsively obsessed with perceived flaws in how they look, at a really deep, almost frenzied level. The obsession with “fixing” your flaws/ yourself is profound. Over time, with no treatment, your entire life can revolve around it — especially if you have social media platforms that are designed to aggravate these symptoms. Girls with body dysmorphic disorder can end up unable to leave their houses, being totally unable to participate comfortably in public settings, being drawn further and further into the disease, isolated in reality and trapped… on Instagram.
Body dysphoria has a lot in common with OCD in that the behavior can be very compulsive. Some people with body dysphoria self-mutiliate, either in an attempt to “fix” the problem area, or out of self hatred and anger directed towards the self. And of course, it is direct route/co-morbidity to eating disorders. I’ve seen a few articles here and there about SnapChat, a serial abuser of teen girls, and “Snapchat-dysphoria,” where teens acquire unrealistic beauty standards due to filters on the app, and then get plastic surgery (which is worth a great deal of money), obviously. As you would expect, the rate of plastic surgery in teens and early 20s has been consistently going up for years.
What is more effective in driving long term consumerism? Making women feel bad about themselves, yes, so they buy more to fix it. But what is the next level of that? What about, giving women entire full blown mental illnesses, that can literally be lifelong/permanent? What if you hurt them, permanently, at this exact important point where the spending habits for the rest of their lives will be altered?
You’re talking about having the full force of Meta’s data cranking down on the situation, and that is a force multiplier compared to what was once accomplished with things like magazines in the checkout lines and television shows. They are literally just trying to figure out how to make more money out of you. They don’t have goals such as making teen’s lives better, improve the self esteem of teen girls, reducing bullying between children. And they are going to do whatever the algorithms and data crunching comes back with, using money as the sole barometer.
Think about the pure amount of *money* that Meta can make off advertising for teen girls who have body dysmorphia. Instagram isn’t showing you “more of the content you want to see”, its showing you the content that it thinks is going to make you buy something. Meta itself has a direct financial investment in pushing teen girls further and further so they are producing money for their company (of all grown, mainly White and Asian, men). Facebook is able to do ad targeting to these teens that prey on their worse insecurities, which it is able to pick up from probably 50,000 data points it is pulling for each user. So Instagram starts flooding young girls with stuff that is specifically about their insecurity: maybe hair length or thickness, acne, their noses and eyes, eyelashes. 15% off if you sign up for our mailing list. People with body dysmorphia often spend really significant amounts of money on addressing the perceived flaw (which, the obsession often moves around from one feature to the next, because it is not about a superficial insecurity, it is about an underlying medical condition). Think about the amount of makeup alone they can sell to girls. Makeup has had this huge renaissance on social media. Makeup “transformation” is a key genre: girls wear makeup to make their nose look straighter or their face look longer or to have a more chiseled jawline. It’s easy to spend thousands of dollars on different palettes. (I have never done this). Since body dysmorphia, by definition, cannot be fixed by consumerism, in fact, it just makes it worse, there is no satisfying result to be found and then it gets worse and worse.
When people talk about the algorithm deciding “what to show you”, they leave out that most of what they are talking about is the advertising, period. The PR explanation for what is happening to these girls is: girls consume content about things like dieting, and then from there, because the algorithm is there to show you more of the things you like (LOL), the girls fall into a rabbit hole of extreme content, because “that’s what gets the most engagement” (i.e., its the users, not the platform!). In this false notion, the process of the “self esteem spiral” is kicked off by the girl, a total falsehood, when what is happening is Instagram is SERVING GIRLS the messages its advertisers demand. Their entire goal is to sell you products, and the innovation of Meta is that it has found a way to permanently damage people for the rest of their lives, to make them more susceptible to advertising then and forever more.
And what it serves to the wounded has often been outright unhealthy, age inappropriate or dangerous, as we see in cases like the Kardashians promoting diet teas and extreme waist trainers and other things along those lines, unregulated supplements and extreme dieting and the sort. Girls in their teens are already getting botox and fillers. Reflected in phrases like “Snapchat Dysphoria”, teen girls are getting more plastic surgery at younger and younger ages. This carries not only the risk of complications but also, plastic surgery addiction. The pain of body dysmorphia is so powerful that it drives ever more consumerism and consumerism and consumerism. It is the mental illness most likely to drive spending. The fact that that illness, is the one they are giving to teen girls? Is not some fucking coincidence. Grow up.
This is happening because Facebook is MOLDING people, but ESPECIALLY teen girls, into bigger and bigger consumers, in ways that produce the desired behavior. Again, we think that technology is taking our data points, our interactions, and bringing to us a constellation of content based on our actual interests, that we are the point of genesis for the algorithm — instead of it being they are designing an algorithm to make you who they need you to be. Which is buying shit. And what is broken, it seems, buys. And not only that, provides more and more of Meta’s ACTUAL product: teen girls, to their wider consumer base. Because its not just about turning teen girls into the best consumers; it’s about turning them into what their other users want to consume.
75% of teens 13-17 in America are on Instagram, spending an average of an hour on it each and every day. This is the most popular app for teens. That’s over 20 million teen girls spending an hour a day on this site, and for many of those girls, those numbers are much much higher. Their content, of course, is dominant on the platform: the girls ARE the content that the algorithm is delivering to its users. Nothing has driven Instagram’s “success” more than pictures of teenage girls. The reward mechanisms on the platform drives girls to post more and more pictures of themselves, the very thing that is holding up the entire company, all while teen girls are getting sick and dying from it. They are literally dying so that Meta can get money from teen girls and so it can push pictures of teen girls for its other users to consume.
The rewards structure also encourages ever more intimate content — this is a form of wide-population digital grooming. Which is what other users of the site want, both young boys and adult men: pictures of hot teen girls. That is what brings them to the platform where Meta can then monetize them. It’s almost as if teen girls are a honey pot around which an entire panopticon is built. I’ve written before about how platforms like Snapchat are built in large part on “encouraging” (coercing) teens to express their sexuality on the platform, when they’ve know for a long time that that is not safe to do. They’ve even lied to users saying that their pictures would disappear; later, this content has re-appeared as child sexual abuse material in the several large scale hacks of the platform.
Teen sexuality in and of itself is not a problem. The fact that corporations make use of it as their product, on platforms where there is a massive amount of pedophilic activity, and where massive damage is done to them, and where other teens are not the only audience for the expression, but rather older men and predators — THAT is the problem. Teens should absolutely be able to explore their sexualities with themselves and their peers as they will; expressions of that sexuality should NOT be profited on by adults, in environments when teen girls are not safe in the first place. Meta serves up teen girls on a platter to everyone and anyone who wants to consume them. Teen girls are the product: they are the lure, they are the show and the performance, they are the cultural and virality. And VCs know it!! It’s frequently discussed in the valley how teen girls are the most important demographic when it comes to consumer products, because they drive the most adoption — people go where there are teen girls. This is simply accepted as fact, even though its a pretty clear admission of using teen girls to build wealth for technofascists.
See, this is also about sexual abuse of teen girls, as Meta really was from the inception, and that’s really important to include in this framing; it is what everyone jumps through hoops to avoid acknowledging that it’s not just making teen girls feel bad about themselves, its about sexual abuse and exploitation and yes, pedophiles. Almost 30% of people with body dysmorphia have experienced child sexual abuse. This is yet another place where we see that pedophilia is playing a giant role in the development of these things; but it just is passed off as the girls’ vanity, something the girls are doing to themselves from a character weakness. A few points here, though a detailed treatment will come later: one, which the Chris D’elia case demonstrated in shocking proportions, that these are a huge pedophile hunting grounds, that girls are attacked en masse by pedophiles via these platforms. I imagine that it’s similar to other patterns we see in medicine where child sexual abuse can cause a propensity towards certain mental illnesses and other aftershocks, but that that may or may not actually manifest and those conditions can then be triggered by the environment. I’m going to write more extensively about tech, teen girls and pedophiles, but please note that young-age sexual abuse results in a huge likelihood of eating disorders and body dysmorphia, and that what we are seeing in teen girls online has deep ties to sexual abuse, and that sexual abuse is a key function operating around teen girls online, weather that is schoolmates sexually harassing them or the many pedophiles approaching them.
The fact that the incentives and interests of pedophiles and Meta — access to, exploitation and harm of teen girls — line up simpatico, is all the evidence a reasonable court would need to shut these fuckers down.
It is alarming that the victims of Meta, even in their deaths, are turned into salacious stories, documentaries, miniseries, etc. etc. Because one thing society loves to consume is girls in pain. Stories of girls getting cyberbullied until they commit suicide, are a particular crowd favorite. And everyone loves a low-weight anorexic teenager, right? We saw that in the early aughts anorexia outbreak. People LOVE when teen girls have eating disorders. It provides from an entire profitable ecosystem, based on consumption of graphic harm to teen girls.
What if what Meta’s product isn’t just the girls themselves, but all of those girls in pain, those girls vulnerable, those girls injured and weak? When all of the girls get eating disorders, isn’t that in and of itself going to drive massive amounts of usage of the platform as people come to gawk at yet round of widespread mental illness that is being purposefully inflicted on teen girls? At this point, we’re not looking at a “negative influence” on teen girls, you’re looking at a suite of products that are consistently harming one group of their users for the benefit of themselves and others, knowingly, repeatedly, across multiple generations.
Why is Meta allowed to prey on young girls, for years on end, with known devastating consequences that have been documented since inception? Outside of the tech industry, it’s because societally we fucking hate teen girls; they are one of the most targeted and abused demographic, and it is in particular a time when teen girls are subjected to huge amounts of dating violence, pedophilia, rape, bullying, harassment. I have come to think of the teen age as the key period in which girls are broken (in) by society; this is when they really get kicked by misogyny and transformed into whatever society (or Meta) needs them to be. The massive swarm of violence around the teen girl… horrifying.
All of these effects, these mental illnesses and deaths, are broadly looked at as an unintended consequence of technology and something that is more reflective of the teen demographic, perhaps, than the company itself. After all, young girls are so flighty and vain and superficial, right?
For its part, Meta will not stop hurting teen girls for money. That is its business model and it has been since Mark Zuckerberg put pictures of two girls next to each other and had a bunch of men pile on for the opportunity to demean, make fun of, and objectify them without their consent. Meta is worth $342 billion and had a revenue of $117 billion, and that is almost entirely based on advertising dollars. They currently hold $58 billion of cash. That is a fortune that is built on teen girls, but far from enriching their lives, it makes them incalculably and even mortally worse. Girls are losing their lives for this, and that is baked into the business model. This isn’t about AI ethics or the unconscious bias of the engineers who make the algorithms, this is about the foundational model of all social networks and the fact that they have all, knowingly, for decades, put girls through an absolute meat grinder of desperately low self esteem, inflicted mental illness, sexual abuse, bullying and pedophilia. The truly heinous thing is that these aren’t temporary problems. This is far beyond creating more insecurity, they are about actually GIVING girls serious mental illnesses that can ruin their fucking lives, and their most formative years.
Advice for parents on how to help with this puts responsibility yet again on the teen and the home. In blogs for parents, pundits suggest addressing “excessive internet consumption” or “help build their self esteem” or “have frank and open discussions about photo editing”. But that’s not the problem here, and there is no “frank and open discussion” when it comes to usage of a platform that specifically and knowing, captures and breaks teen girls for turn a profit for white male billionaires.
It does bring up the question: if these powerful platforms can be used to induce body dysmorphia, anorexia, bulimia and suicide, could they be used to help make people better instead? To *improve* self esteem? To heal some of the trauma that teens experience in today’s day and age? To help keep them at a healthy, to protect them from others? Incentives, incentives, incentives.
Meta has absolutely no business interest in any positive result on young people.
More reason why we need to seize Meta: these platforms are built with the data of the people and these platforms should be run BY the people in their interest, and with an explicit goal of protecting teen girls. Meta should be turned over as a democratic utility, and its wealth should be re-distributed back to the group that made it possible and that has been brutalized by it: teen girls.