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Instagram’s Negative Effect on Young Users
The topic I have chosen for this paper will be the negative effects of Instagram on young
adults. As adolescents grow, social media platforms such as Instagram, expose them to the
respective cultures of large amounts of users, causing mental, physical and life changing
alterations. From my research throughout this paper I will use four sources to be able to justify
the claim. This paper will be broken up into three separate sections involving the effect on
Instagram on its users. Instagram is mainly a place for sharing pictures and videos with friends,
family or even strangers. As many may know the way Instagram works is you post a picture and
those who follow you or search you up can view that picture and have the choice of liking your
picture or leaving a comment on that post. Instagram allows you to block certain users of your
choice while also allowing you to make your profile private from those who you have not
accepted their follow request. Instagram also keeps track of the amount of likes your picture or
video receives and allows you and your followers to see this amount of likes on each post you
have made. A picture or video can receive an unlimited amount of likes. For example, famous
individuals many times have photos with millions of likes and comments.
The founders of Instagram have designed the social media app to track the amount of
likes one’s photo or video may receive, which leads me into my first topic, how Instagram
affects a user’s brain. According to Susie East’s article “Teens: This is How Your Social Media
Affects Your Brain,” “Researchers at UCLA’s Brain Mapping Center have found that when
teenagers’ photos or videos get a lot of “likes” which are indicated by a heart symbol below the
post, on social media applications such as Instagram, their brains respond in similar ways to
seeing loved ones or winning money”. The amount of likes a photo or video receives on
Instagram affects an adolescent’s brain drastically. In East’s article for CNN, she explains that
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when teens see posts that are popular or have high amounts of “likes”, a part of the brain called
the “nucleus accumbens” is triggered. The nucleus accumbens plays the main role in an
individual’s reward circuit. According to the article “The Brain from Top to Bottom”, the
nucleus accumbens is operated off of dopamine which encourages desire and serotonin which
promotes inhibition. This area of the brain can be provoked whenever one has seen or done
something their brain feels is “rewarding”. When users are on Instagram, this area of the brain
can be significantly triggered, which East’s states could “inspire them to use social media more
often”. In East’s article, she later transitions into how social media is changing the brain. East
gathers information from studies made by Dr. Iroise Dumontheil, at Birkbeck University and
elaborates on his findings. In East’s article, she gives credit to Dumontheil and his “reports that
social media is affecting our brain, particularly its plasticity, which is the way the brain grows
