The use of Instagram and social media effects many teenage girls’ body image because they are worried about the amount of likes they get, amount of people who comment under their picture and how they are perceived by their peers. Social media has become a threat to many in the world today by making them think they are not good enough because they do not look like someone famous. Many scholars such as Laura Smith, Jessica Ridgeway and Jasmine Fardouly think Instagram has a negative effect on teenagers and how they perceive themselves. On the other hand, Sarah Gervais, a journalist, thinks Instagram and social media in general have a positive effect on girls. Gervais talks about how photography plays a big role in how girls feel about themselves and also says editing pictures makes girls feel good. Girls take outsiders perspective of their bodies and they see themselves through the same view that the photograph might use when the camera is zoomed in on their bad spots helping covering them up. (Gervais) Gervais says that when girls edit their pictures, it makes them feel better about their bodies than before. Also, Gervais says that how girls perceive their selves through the camera lens does not affect how they feel about themselves because they are more concerned with how others think they look. When it comes down to it girls do not let Instagram affect them because editing their photo makes them feel good. But after looking at multiple studies and sources, it is clear that social media does have a negative effect on a girl’s body image and their body satisfaction. Social media does a lot to a teenager, a girl, athlete, etc. It causes a lot of stress, anxiety, and then not liking who they are. From going through different studies, I want to argue that social media and Instagram does have a negative effect on girls’ body image. 

 According to Jessica Ridgeway and Russel Clayton, people rely on what other people think about them and let their opinions affect them in ways that make them not like their selves (Ridgeway). In a research study Ridgeway and Clayton conducted, they investigated Instagram and found that body image satisfaction is associated with increased selfie posting. Ridgeway and Clayton also found that the increase of selfie posting leads to conflict and an increase in negative romantic relationship outcomes. (Ridgeway). The results in this study indicate that body image satisfaction is continuously associated with the increase of Instagram selfie posting and in Instagram related conflict, which also relates to an increase in negative romantic relationship outcomes. Not only does Instagram affect body image, but it can also get personal and affect someone’s relationship. It is depressing to think that people who use Instagram let a social media site ruin not only their view of themselves but their relationship with their partner. 

Katlyn Tolly argues that anxiety causes stress to an average student’s college experience (Tolly). In Tolly’s article, students were interviewed and asked different questions about how anxiety causes stress and how social media effects a college student’s body image. Students mentioned how they think that they have to be the perfect person for everyone else, and how they see themselves does not matter. “I think it adds a lot of pressure to be the perfect person because that’s how we can make ourselves look online,” says Shannon Smith,18, a Columbia College Chicago student. They rely on social media to help them with their body image and they rely on presenting themselves in an ideal way instead of just being themselves. One hundred percent of the people interviewed, twenty-three college students, said they believe social media is a main factor in anxiety or added stress to a student’s experience in college (Tolly). All of the college students surveyed say they have experienced some type of fear of missing out. When they view photos of their peers having fun, they begin to feel not as important. Some students feel as if they need to post something on social media to make it look like they are having fun. “You might just be trying to study and feel pressured to look like you’re having fun and post it online as if you’re having a great time and college is awesome, when in reality it might not be,” says Brandy Miller. A lot of students also said that social media tends to get in the way of their school work. Some students said they find themselves logging onto social media sites when they know they should be studying (Tolly). Social media is starting to take over students and their education because they feel as if they do not fit in with their friends. Social media distracts students from their school work and focusing on what is important. 

The problem associated with body image and Instagram not only affects regular day to day girls, but it also affects athletes and how they perceive themselves. Researchers selected a day that they would work backwards from and collected data of the 50 most recent photos from different athletes’ Instagram accounts. The researchers analyzed the photos and captions separately. The researchers collected data from athlete’s in several sports based on their photos from their Instagram accounts. According to the article, “The sample yielded 1,352 photographs and captions. The breakdown for photographs is as follows: 202 came from basketball, 200 from soccer, 151 from tennis, 199 from track, and 200 each from golf, swimming, and baseball/softball” (Smith). They broke the examination into three parts, how athletes use pictures on their Instagram as a form of self-presentation, what major differences were in the gender displays of self-presentation and analyzed the captions used by athletes on their pictures. The article results came back in full perspective of how athletes rely on the public and how they are viewed by the public. But regrading to results and the study that was done, public image to athletes mean very much to them and how they continue to look at themselves. Athletes love attention from society or even a social media site so if they are not getting that attention that they think they need; it causes them to think of themselves in a different way that they are not important or good enough to be an athlete. When thinking of an athlete, it is not thought that they would care how people look at them but as Smith shows even the people we think have high self-esteem, are negatively influenced by social media. 

In these previously mentioned studies it is shown that how people perceive themselves is a key factor to them about their body image. There was a study done on the effect of Instagram usage on body satisfaction designed to see whether this effect is tested by appearance self-schema and self-discrepancy, and to see whether self-esteem moderates this effect. “Body image is defined as one’s attitudinal disposition toward that physical self which includes evaluative, cognitive, and behavioral components.” (Ahadzadeh) The study followed the bootstrapping procedures, bootstrapping provides you with higher statistical power and more accurate solutions for testing of the indirect effects than other methods used. Bootstrapping in statistics is any test or metric that relies on random sampling with replacement, it allows assigning measures of accuracy to sample estimates. The results in this study showed that Instagram usage infringe upon young adults’ body image satisfaction. The significant negative interaction of self-esteem and Instagram usage indicate that self-esteem weakens the effect of Instagram usage on self-schema. Self-schema is a lot stronger for people with a lower level self-esteem. Self-schema refers to a long lasting and stable set of memories that summarize a person’s beliefs, experiences and generalizations about the self, in specific behavioral domains. Results also showed self-esteem moderates the influence of Instagram photo exposure on body image that is mediate by appearance self-schema and appearance self-discrepancy. The results of this study shows that Instagram usage intrude upon young adults’ body image satisfaction. Body image plays a big role in people’s everyday life. It either helps them or hurts them.

 On an online video broadcasted on YouTube, a girl is explaining that girls look at their peers on Instagram by viewing their photos and wishing they were them instead of being happy with their selves. She also interviews this woman over the phone who almost killed herself from an eating disorder because she was not pleased with herself. Up until her early twenties she tried to be someone she was not. At twenty-one she had to fake her own death and at the age of thirty-two her sister died, she had a little girl and thought to herself, “this is not how I want my daughter to live”. She said it took a toll on her and was eye opening. The main point is that, you should love yourself as who you are. When trying to be someone you are not or trying to be someone different than who you are, can cause not only damage emotionally but physically. 

With things being physically abusive to you especially like social media, it can take major tribute for things getting inner and emotional. There has been recent research on fMRI scanner images of the brains of 32 teenagers as they use social media app resembling Instagram. “When teens learn that their own pictures have supposedly received a lot of likes, they show significantly greater activation in parts of the brain’s reward circuitry,” says lead author Lauren Sherman (Susie East). Sherman also explains, “This is the same group of regions responding when we see pictures of a person we love or when we win money” (Susie East). The researchers watched the brain activity as teens used the app and they found that certain regions become activated by “likes”, with the brains reward center becoming more active. Researchers also showed the teenagers 140 pictures where the “likes” were believed to be from their peers, but they were assigned by the research team. The article states, “Scans revealed that the nucleus accumbens, a part of the brain’s reward circuitry, was especially active when teens saw a large number of likes on their own photos, which could inspire them to use social media more often” (Susie East) Researchers found that the teenager’s brains were more active when the teens saw a large number of likes on their own pictures, so researchers think that is what inspires teens to use social media more. The researchers also used peer influence to see how the teenagers would act and they found that the teenagers are more likely to like the popular pictures that their friends like. The teenagers were more likely to like the popular pictures regardless of what they showed. Researchers also think social media is the reason why teenager’s brains change and grow the way they do. By using social media, a teenagers’ brain is active from using Instagram and while using this app their brains are activated by the likes they get and how outsiders perceive them. The youth of the United States should not have to grow up thinking it is okay to let another person’s view of them be how they continue to look at their own selves. 

While thinking about Instagram, Jasmine Fardouly, Lenny Vartanian, and Rebecca Pinkus say that Instagram feeds do more damage to someone’s body image than billboards. A lot of people edit their pictures to cover blemishes, hide dark spots or make their face look thinner. When people see other attractive images on Instagram, research shows that people often compare their own body image to those images and they think they are less attractive than the pictures that they see (Fardouly et al). As Fardouly, Vartanian and Pinkus argue, these comparisons can make women unhappy with how they look and make them feel even worst about themselves more so than how they felt before (Fardouly et al). Body Dissatisfaction is a main predictor of eating disorders (Fardouly et al). Research has focused on people comparing their own bodies to models on TV, in magazines, or on Instagram(Fardouly, et al). In a study, 150 female undergraduate students answered an online survey five times a day for five days. For each of the surveys, they had to report if they had compared their appearance with someone else’s and whether or not they made the comparison after looking at social media, traditional media, or in person. They had to also report if they thought the person looked better or the same or worse than them. Also on the survey they had to rate their body image, mood and thoughts of being on a diet and exercising. The article says, “Women mostly thought others looked better than them on social media. This is likely due to women selectively posting the most attractive images of themselves on social media and enhancing those images to look like images in magazines, which are routinely edited” (Fardouly, et al). Fardouly, Vartanian, and Pinkus go on to explain that, “women have reported to be in a bad mood after comparing their selves to other women on social media” (Fardouly, et al). People who use social media in a daily routine who make comparisons to others need to try and avoid social media and stay away from it so they can feel better about themselves. 

While women judge themselves against the images in magazines and Victoria Secret advertisements, social media also has a major effect on women’s body image satisfaction. From Disney movies, Barbie dolls, and digitally augmented women in magazines, all of these images ultimately effect the self-esteem of young girls and women. As Kendyl Barney argues, “They’re photoshopped; nobody really looks like that” (Barney). Hopefully women in real life acknowledge that women do not actually look like that. Social media is threatening to young women on a new level as it gives the impression of normality (Barney). I personally know multiple girls who follow different Instagram accounts so that they can look at them and feel as if that is how they should look. “Some of them are ‘famous’ solely due to the fact that they fit society’s standards of sex appeal and take advantage of it by posting half-naked photos on Instagram. Worse yet, their photos are re-posted on ‘feature’ accounts, such as @inlove_withfitness, where photos of petite women are mass-collected alongside pictures of fresh fruit and squat tutorials,” states Barney. When other girls see these women exercising or eating healthy, girls think since these Instagram models are doing it that they have to do it as well so they can look like them. No matter what, when you see a picture posted in Instagram, it always appears candid (Barney). It gives women an illusion that these images are not professional, they are subjects that are not altered or photo shopped ahead the adding of a filter (Barney). When viewing these photos, it presents a singular standard of beauty in the minds of women who see it. As Barney explains a stereotypical reaction to these photos: “She has millions of followers because she is beautiful. I want to be beautiful like her. I want her life” (Barney). When reading this article, it becomes apparent that social media has a tremendous responsibility for how women portray themselves and that is a horrible thing.

Research has been done on teenage girls and how social media and Instagram plays a considerable role in their lives. A lot of people let social media and Instagram make them think that they need to look like someone else instead of themselves. What these girls are experiencing is a world where counting calories and talking about eating less with their friends is the norm. There are websites that give girls steps on how to be anorexic. From athletes to students to all girls who regularly partake in social media seem influenced by this type of body image influence. No one should have to feel like they are not good enough to live in this world based on other people. Instagram nor social media should be the reason someone feels less of themselves.  
