[kelseyfrog]

Sure, but take it a step further and analyze it.

Does Instagram, knowing this information, have any obligations when making choices that affect teen's mental health? Would making choices which negatively affect teen's mental health be an ethical action? One such choice could be segmenting user's by mental health for the purpose of advertisement. Is such a segmentation ethical? What if doing so increases Instagram's profit (say for example teens who struggle are more susceptible to ads), does that change your answer? Should that change Instagram's answer?

My point is that we are capable and obliged to dive deeply into these questions. 22% of teens[p24] of a total 22M teens(DAU)[1] are negatively affected by Instagram. This is 4.1 million people - not a small number. By stopping short and simply saying teens are twice as likely to benefit than suffer ignores the 4.1 million teens who are suffering. I'm not sure they take much solace that 8.2 million feel better off.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-tox...

[ta20211004_1]

You're right and Facebook should be taking action to reduce the negative effects their products are having on teens.

I have no idea if any of the recommendations at the end of the study were actually put into action.

To me a charitable interpretation of the tone of this presentation, which focuses on highlighting negative outcomes rather than celebrating positive outcomes, was to identify areas for improvement. Again, interpreting charitably, this means the company is interested in identifying and reducing negative impacts.

Again, I don't know if they ever made any of these changes. I would like to see more transparency from the company.

[mgraczyk]

Instagram certainly has an ethical obligation to act on this and improve the situation.

At the time that I left Instagram in early 2020, there were more people working on improving wellbeing, particularly for teens, than working on trying to improve engagement. I wasn't specifically tasked to work on well-being, but like all engineers working on recommendations I was required to work with wellbeing and completely address all well-being concerns before shipping anything.