Press Releases | Research | Technology
July 16, 2024
Concern about the impact of social media The Mental Health Crisis Among Adolescents has reached such a level that the majority of states in the country have filed lawsuits against Meta (which owns Instagram and Facebook) and the U.S. Surgeon General Last month, they called for warning labels to be placed on platformssimilar to those of tobacco.
But a new study from the University of Washington finds that while some teens experience negative feelings when using Instagram, the overriding feeling they feel when using the platform is boredom. They open the app because they’re bored. They then scroll through largely unrelated content, feeling mostly bored, while searching for interesting things to share with their friends in direct messages, the most consistent source of connection they’ve found on the platform. Then, tired of what the researchers call a “content soup,” they log off.
The study tracked the moment-by-moment experiences of 25 American teens as they used the app. The teens relied on a few techniques to stabilize their experiences, such as using likes, follows, and unfollows to organize their feeds, and tuning out annoying content. The researchers used these findings to make a few design recommendations, including prompts to encourage reflection while using the app or features that clarify and simplify how users can organize their feeds.
The team present his research June 18 at the ACM Interaction Design and Children conference in Delft, the Netherlands.
“A lot of the talk on social media is extreme,” the lead author said. Rotem Landesmana doctoral student at UW in the School of Information. “We hear about harassment or bullying — which are real things — or this sort of techno-utopian vision of things, where companies like Meta and others seem to say they’re constantly thinking about well-being, but we haven’t seen any real results yet. So we really wanted to study the everyday, mundane experiences of teenagers using Instagram.”
To capture this moment-to-moment experience, the team first trained participants in mindfulness techniques and asked them to download an app called AppMinder. The simple interface, developed by the researchers, appeared five minutes after the teens began using Instagram and asked them to fill out a quick questionnaire about how they were feeling and why they were feeling that way. The pop-ups appeared once every three hours. The teens were expected to use Instagram and fill out at least one response per day for seven days, though many submitted multiple responses each day.
Finally, the researchers surveyed the teens about their responses and asked them to open Instagram again and report how they felt in real time and explain how they experienced certain features.
“We’ve seen teens turn to Instagram in moments of boredom, looking for some kind of stimulation,” said co-lead author Alexis HinikerUW associate professor at the iSchool. “They were finding enough moments of closeness and connection with their friends on the app to keep them coming back. That value is there, but it’s really buried in gimmicks, attention-grabbing features, sometimes distracting or frustrating content, and a tonne of waste.
Most of the content Instagram’s algorithm suggested wasn’t what teens were looking for. Yet they were scrolling through hundreds of posts to find a single meme or fashion inspiration to share with their friends. Overall, it was the app’s direct messaging feature that resonated most with them, not scrolling.
Because they found value in specific experiences, teens used several mitigation strategies to focus their time on the app:
- They try to manage their feeds to highlight posts that make them feel good rather than bad or annoying, by following, unfollowing, hiding, and liking.
- Scrolling quickly, skipping or logging out when the content made them uncomfortable
- Enable/disable Instagram features (hide like count, turn off certain notifications) to reduce negative emotions
“Instagram’s push notifications and algorithmically curated feeds still promise teens a meaningful interaction experience, while only intermittently delivering on that promise,” said co-lead author Katie DavisUW associate professor at the iSchool. “Unfortunately, it’s much easier to identify the problem than to fix it. The current business model of most social media platforms is based on keeping users scrolling as often and for as long as possible. Legislation is needed to force platforms to change the status quo.”
Based on their findings, the researchers proposed three design changes to improve the teen experience:
- Notifications, like those from AppMinder, that prompt teens to think about what they’re doing on Instagram and reflect on the moment
- Features that make it easier to select feeds, like a “This is good for me” button that clearly highlights positive content
- Using data to track signs of well-being and their opposite — for example, tracking when users skip content or log off and associating that with other data
This summer, the team will take the data from the study and review it with a separate group of teens, with the goal of gaining further insights and recommendations.
“It is not and should not be the sole responsibility of teenagers to improve their experiences, to navigate these algorithms without knowing exactly how they work,” Landesman said. “That responsibility also falls on the companies that run the social media platforms.”
Additional co-authors include Jina Yoondoctoral student at UW in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering; Jae Won Kima UW doctoral student at the iSchool; Daniela E. Muñoz Lopeza UW psychology doctoral student; and Lucia Magis-Weinbergassistant professor of psychology at the University of Washington. This research was funded in part by the Oread Fund and the CERES network.
For more information, contact Landesman at roteml@uw.eduHiniker to alexisr@uw.edu and Davis at kdavis78@uw.edu.
Keyword(s): Alexis Hiniker • Information School • Katie Davis • Rotem Landesman