Blaming Instagram for the terrible outcomes it has for teenage girls is a bit like suing a highway construction company for the way people drive on it. Instagram, after all, doesn’t create any of the content, it just created the platform. Yes, there’s a certain design at play in the forum, but the content is all user-generated. And they’re a business, so of course their goal was engagement and making a desirable product, which for them didn’t involve content, just infrastructure. They created an easy way to share pictures, a like and share button, and left the rest up to us. And the sad reality is what we’ve done with it and how it has exposed our own negative proclivities. As if the natural and expected outcomes of teenage girls socializing were all going to be good and somehow these wicked companies led them all astray.

    In part people are upset with Instagram because it had the gall to convey the reality of just how abusive and immature and shallow and emotionally fragile a large number of teenage girls are. Entirely unintentionally, of course. Teenage girls suffer because this is what happens when you give that amount of social and creative power to teenage girls. But we like to have our illusions, especially about how inherently good or how mature our children are, particularly because that reflects on us as parents, and so we go looking for someone to blame. In this case, the conveyance. The structure, not the actors. 

   There’s not really anything you can point to in Instagram itself that’s obviously malicious. However, it can have very malicious outcomes in the hands of certain kinds of people. Like I said, it’s more like a road than it is like anything on the road. It’s not the app design or the functionality or the way the like button works or how fast or slow the sharing is that’s making girls upset. In that sense it’s not Instagram that’s making them unhappy. Instagram is the conveyance, but it’s really other girls that are making girls unhappy. Instagram, like any good road, just makes it easier and faster and more efficient to get there. 

   The only really viable option for an actual solution would be to ban specific ages and/or genders from using the platform. No more adolescent scent or teenage girls on Instagram, or maybe just so young people in general. And while that might work to protect teen girls who get bullied, it would also be a very big restriction of freedom for all the people who don’t have the same problems. Or at least don’t have them to the same degree that they’re a serious issue.

  Should you punish everyone as a group by denying them freedoms simply because some of them aren’t able to handle it and have bad outcomes? That’s a pretty big move to make, from a governmental standpoint. Sure, it’s the sort of thing parents or kids could and probably should decide for themselves. Are you going to decide it for them? And how well is that likely to go? Can you really stop them? Will making it illegal and setting it behind an age barrier just encourage teenagers to try to access it even more, as a symbol of maturity and rebellion and risk taking, like they do with underage drinking?

   In my opinion social media is just as dangerous as alcohol, for many of the same reasons. It disinhibits, it encourages certain kinds of antisocial behavior. It’s not exactly the alcohol that’s bad, it’s who we become when we’re on it. Because it’s not all puppies and rainbows that we’re keeping inside ourselves. And a little inhibition, a little limitation, might be good for us. But outright bans don’t always go the way you would hope. Prohibition didn’t exactly go over well. Buy plenty of people have decided to voluntarily curtail or even avoid drinking altogether, purely as an individual reaponsibk choice. And people are starting to do that with social media too. But it’s not easy to say no to something that so many other people are using and enjoying. It’s not easy to deliberately leave yourself out. 

   Personally, I think as long as we have Twitter our society will be being pushed further and further toward the brink of disaster. But I also don’t think you can forcibly stop people from using it or deny them the ability to use it. Taking away a simple freedom like being able to say something fairly brief online and have other people see and share it, and maybe express their own opinion about it, would actually be a far greater imposition than something more complex and less common. You’re only exercising your most basic freedoms and abilities, so any forcible abridgement of their exercise cuts to your most basic and fundamental rights as a human being. Unfortunately, it’s also true that those most basic rights and abilities are also the most powerful and, in many ways, the most dangerous, if we don’t know how to regulate them.

   Words can set a city on fire. And for a people who have lost control of their tongues, giving them a platform that extends the power of their speech and social influence to an almost unimaginable degree is like giving a monster truck to a four year old. They’re going to crush everything in their path.