"[Teens] often feel 'addicted' and know that what they're seeing is bad for their mental health but feel unable to stop themselves."

Wendy Gross: "We recently wrapped research on teens' mental health - how they define it, how they talk about, how Instagram may affect it, and how we can help them. This research was conducted to inform outreach teams on how to build meaningful and impact campaigns and yielded suggestions for both product and outreach teams to support teens. # TL;DR: * Teens generally agree on the definition of mental health, what issues fall into the category of mental health, and the language to describe feeling unwell. * 82% of teens have felt at least one emotional issue in the past month. One in five has thought about suicide or self-injury. * Teens say Instagram has had a positive impact on their mental health, but those who are unsatisfied with their lives are more negatively affected by the app. * Harm on Instagram falls into three major categories: social comparison, social pressure, and negative interactions with other people. * Teens feel they have to cope alone, but they want help. * Product suggestions include personalized Explore and Feed, better time spent tools, and opting out of personally triggering ad categories. * Outreach suggestions include a page about feeling good about yourself, content to help teens talk about these issues, and parents education." Kenzie Snyder: "Thanks Wendy! I'm curious whether anything came up in terms of time spent on the app influencing mental health? I'm kicking off a workstream around well-being and app dependency" Wendy Gross: "Hi Kenzie! We actually heard a lot about this! In the focus groups teens told us that they don't like the amount of time they spend on the app but feel like they have to be present. They often feel 'addicted' and know that what they're seeing is bad for their mental health but feel unable to stop themselves. This makes them not feel like they get a break or can't switch off social media. In the survey, about 30% (and even larger proportions of those who are unsatisfied with their lives) said that the amount of time they spend on social media makes them feel worse. About half of teens in both markets want Instagram to encourage them to take a break or to get off the app (see slide 48). In other work (https://fb.workplace.com/groups/InstaInsights/permalink/2424618707586730/) we found that time spent is among one of the most negative experiences for IG (25%+ say they spend too much time on social media, and it's worst on Instagram and Facebook). At the same time, they didn't think there was anything they could do about it and had fairly negative things to say about the time spent tools we have (particularly that the tools are easy to ignore)"