The company privately acknowledged that “We make body-image issues worse for one in three teenage girls” in an internal discussion of the results.

Facebook aims to entice younger users

While it was operating multi-year studies into these effects for its own private use, Facebook is accused of attempting to shut down external research into the negative effects of its platforms.

The company is, in fact, working to market Instagram to even younger audiences, despite its own findings about what extensive use of the platform did to the currently allowed over-13 demographic.

Instagram Youth is supposedly being developed to keep  children safe online by giving them a restricted version of the app which will not contain advertisements or certain content.

What goes unsaid is that Facebook is developing a supposedly child-friendly version to entice a new generation of social media addicts who will be even more deeply affected by what they see being posted.

Mark Zuckerberg dismissed concerns about the findings and claimed that they were too ambiguous to draw any conclusions about the effects of Instagram, despite the fact that the company itself was willing to privately draw those conclusions.

The potential for social media to brainwash people and worsen their mental health will be drastically expanded if Facebook succeeds in its efforts to catch prospective users at an even younger age.