I don't agree that this is Meta's fault. They gave females a window to the world and that made them depressed. Does this mean Meta should just close shop? Are they responsible for the mental health of their users?
I love how everyone here is blaming something different: parents, Meta, advertisement, political divisiveness, urban planning, society, lack of personal responsibility. Soon there will be more reasons, like violence and money. And they're right, sure. All of those are partially responsible.
But I feel we tend to give a pass to the people who are actually producing the content that is damaging a generation and making bank, as if they have no agency or responsibility.
Instagram would probably be great overnight if those people suddenly all disappeared.
It's similar to swengs - before remote work one could be a king of their own place for a lot of money, now swengs need to compete for much cheaper with people from all around the world who might cheat in unimaginable ways to land a job. Like all those plastic-perfect pseudocelebrity influencers on Instagram sucking all ad money, making droves of people super depresses when they look in a mirror. It's also much easier to get in touch with them directly, damaging opportunities of worse-looking real people to socialize.
"Beauty filters", in the form of cosmetics, have been widely used by both men and women at least since the days of ancient Egypt, 5000 years ago. Likely before... that's just the earliest record we have.