And Now, Instagram

Facebook isn't just in trouble after former Facebook employee Frances Haugen (below) blew the whistle on its encouragement of hate speech to make money.  Instagram is now under scrutiny for promoting itself to teenage girls and damaging their sense of self-worth.

It seems that teenage girls spend a lot of time on Instagram looking at pictures of perfectly beautiful women in their early twenties - the very sort of women that teenage girls always try to emulate - and develop inferiority complexes when they realize that they can't have perfect bodies or faces like the young women they want to be like.   Many of them starve themselves for that perfect body, and some of them engage in even more destructive behavior.   Instagram has created a whole generation of teenagers - not just girls, but, I'm sure, but boys also (imagine Big Man On Campus types Instagram on making geeks feel inferior because they have the cool cars, the cool clothes, and, ironically, the hot girls) - who feel like they're the most cursed generation that has ever lived.  And for reasons having nothing to do with a dying planet.

Oh yeah, I have an account on Instagram.  I mostly use it to look at pictures of cars from automakers and pictures of scenery from friends who travel.  But without a smartphone, I can't post pictures of my own.  (People follow my account anyway.  Go figure.)  I've tried to find a way to post on it with my laptop, but to no avail.  More and more, though, I feel like I'm better off not bothering.  Many of the pictures I see are pictures those same friends have posted on Facebook.  All it's really good for is to follow and communicate with friends who depend more time there than on Facebook or Twitter.   I spend enough time posting pictures on Facebook; why bother to do the same thing on one of Facebook's sister sites?  (I never visit WhatsApp.)

And it's not only  teenagers who get depressed by Instagram.  Listen to this confession from CNN's Anderson Cooper:

"I'm on Instagram and I enjoy it.  I follow friends and look at art sites and things like that. But I gotta say, it depresses me. I mean, I leave feeling worse than when I got on.

"I feel worse about my own life, I cannot imagine what a teenager feels.  I mean, I'm supposedly an adult. What some kid feels looking at other people's lives and how their lives seem much more exciting than their own."

And when I think about it, I get a little depressed too when I go on Instagram and see other people in exotic locales such as France and Holland.  And I'm stuck in New Jersey.  If my friends who use Instagram exclusively - both of them - were on Facebook, I wouldn't go on Instagram so much.

Oh yeah, don't expect Congress, after the Senate heard Haugen testify on Facebook and its sister sites, to go after Mark Zuckerberg like a rabid pit bull.  The Z-man has plenty of lobbyists to tame them.