Instagram Like your Way to Poor Body-Image

Recent trend shows that social network service participants prefer more visualized social network services. According to research done on 2018, it says that there are 1 billion users on Instagram. (Clarke, 2018) Especially, Instagram became one of the popular photo-based platform for teenage females. Based on the fact that Instagram is a major social network service, businesses and advertising producers find significant benefits to promote their products through Instagram. As a demand rising, Instagram also launched skippable ads on their stories system in January 2017, which is that Instagram expose five-second photo or 15- second video advertisement to users while they explore different stories.

With this new type of advertisement system, advertising revenue of Instagram almost doubled in 2017 to 2018.

Furthermore, following current “tailored experience” trend, Instagram also provided tailored advertisement and tailored search engine for every users. Just as other tailored experience services, Instagram gathers and analyzes informations about a single user about what this specific user liked, what kind of hashtags he or she used, and what kind of people he or she follows. All these informations help Instagram, and their advertisement contractors, to figure out what each user will interested in which content, and this tailored advertisement will maximize the effectiveness of advertisement by grabbing users attention easier than before.

Moreover, it also benefits users themselves by giving their information to the big database, it reduces chance for users to see something, advertisement or content, that they are not interested in. This trending tailored experience brings another problem to teenage users, by showing only what they are interested about. This system creates an user an echo chamber that an individual is only exposed to certain topics, for example, fitness. Selecting and showing only information that a particular user might like sounds comfortable and idealistic, but in fact, this means that an individual is constantly absorbing posts and advertisement that injecting message of ideal and perfect body. In this case, an user will perhaps feel that everyone is perfectly shaped except himself or herself, which leads to serious problems like eating disorders. Even worse, users do not have an escape from informations that Instagram prepared for them, except creating new account or searching for other topics furiously.

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