The next speaker in this session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Daria Szafran, whose focus is on the impacts of Instagram use on body image. Body image covers the entirety of a person’s perceptions, thoughts, and feelings about their body, and since the emergence of social media there have been concerns about the impact of visual social media apps on such perceptions.
There are many cross-sectional and experimental studies on such impacts, but many of them are based on small and selective samples involving homogenous user groups, and Instagram usage measurements are often unreliable; there is a need to study these patterns much more broadly and with other approaches.
This project, then, conducted two survey waves in Germany that asked about body image, in between which participants were divided into two distinct groups of which one was asked to abstain from Instagram use for one week. Such usage patterns were also tracked using Instagram data donations from some 25% of participants, and for such donors distinguished between strict (no use) and lenient (no more than one day of use) abstinence.
As it turns out, there was no confirmation of any impact of Instagram abstinence on body image patterns, with the exception of body satisfaction by older users (but only when TikTok use is excluded). Also, of the control group which continued normal Instagram use the data donations did verify that they continued to use Instagram normally; of the treatment group, which was asked to remain abstinent, only 25% were fully abstinent, with some 40% still using the app on up to one day during the study. Self-reports, in other words, cannot be trusted and need to be verified using data donations.
