Why Some Social Media Use Affects Body Image

[Dr. Jennifer Mills]: It’s the type of social media use that matters. Of course, it’s not scrolling through, you know, funny cat videos that’s going to damage anybody’s body image. It’s this very targeted type of social comparison where you’re looking at images of other people and you’re scrutinizing them and perhaps scrutinizing pictures of yourself before posting them on social media, which we know can take up a lot of time and mental energy of young people. So it’s this active engagement with social media images that’s associated with increased levels of body dissatisfaction, both with girls and boys, and that can include liking other people’s pictures or feeling like you have to comment on other people’s pictures. And it’s this act of very, very quick cognitive reactions to what they’re seeing, right? “She looks great. I don’t look so good. I wish I looked like that.” And even when young people are shown images and they know that they’ve been photoshopped or edited, that doesn’t change the fact that they still want to look like that. That’s one of the more concerning findings that we’ve seen. And other researchers have shown that putting disclaimers or putting warning labels on images that have been altered – and coming soon with the emergence of AI, I imagine it’s going to be the same. It doesn’t change young people’s desire to look a certain way because those images become internalized as, “This is what’s beautiful. This is what I want to look like. This is what I need to look like in order to feel like I am attractive, and that I fit in, and that I have value.”