Social Media and Unrealistic Beauty Ideals

Cowritten by Heather Widdows and Jessica Sutherland, University of Warwick

How often do you find you’ve lost an hour passively scrolling through social media? You only sat down for a moment, to take a break, and suddenly half the morning has gone. We scroll almost everywhere, on the sofa, lying in bed, on the bus, waiting for a bus, or, when we can get away with it, in boring work meetings or classes. A recent analysis of findings from the Millennium Cohort Study 2019 shows that nearly half of British 17-year-olds (48 percent; n=7022) feel addicted to social media. Girls reported feeling like this (57 percent) far more than boys (37 percent). This is not an accident; to work, social media must eat our attention. Social media is designed to keep us scrolling. Whether it is addictive in the clinical sense is up for debate, but what is clear is that people feel a lack of control over their social media use.

The effects of this out-of-control use are worrying. The Millennium Cohort Study finds that, amongst 14-year-olds, “greater social media use related to online harassment, poor sleep, low self-esteem and poor body image; in turn these related to higher depressive symptom scores.”1 This is a pretty extensive list of harms, especially if you take seriously the harms of body image dissatisfaction. The evidence shows that it’s not just teens who are affected. In a study of the relationship between social media addiction and body dissatisfaction, it was found that undergraduate women who had more symptoms of social media addiction were more aware of appearance pressure and more likely to internalise the beauty ideal.2

With online culture becoming ever-increasingly visual (think Snapchat, TikTok, BeReal, and Instagram) rather than text-based, we are barraged with images and videos of other people and feel the demands to participate by sharing our own selfies and videos. Using social media in these image-based ways can be particularly problematic.

Social media relies on our undivided attention. It works by keeping us scrolling, liking, commenting, and comparing ourselves to others. Much has already been written about the unrealistic beauty and lifestyle standards perpetuated on social media, in part because we only ever put our “best selves” online. Whilst unrealistic beauty standards in media are nothing new, the amount of images and the time we spend looking at them is. We now spend an average of 2 and ½ hours on social media every day—and some recent not yet published studies suggest this is a low estimate.

Our attention has become a valuable commodity, and social media platforms are working hard to maximise their market share. Gone are the days when social media posts are ordered chronologically; AI-assisted algorithms curate and manage our feeds to maximise attention. The algorithms aim to keep us glued to the screen as long as possible; the algorithms sort and target information into our personal feeds by analysing our likes, comments, and shares. The more we look at certain types of images and videos, the more the algorithm delivers similar content back to us. This creates a filter bubble, an echo chamber where we see more and more similar content. Often in the case of young women, the content we receive is of idealised faces and bodies—the Instagram face, the plastically firm Barbie body, If we ever look at a beauty post, or engage with beauty content, very soon we will be bombarded with posts which promote an unachievable beauty ideal.

Even if we do not personally engage with beauty content, social media algorithms still routinely serve up ideal beauty images because this kind of content is generally popular. It is almost impossible to avoid consuming beauty content in the visual world—give it a try and see how successful you are.

But we can’t only blame the social media algorithms for perpetuating the beauty ideal. We have written previously about what the “ideal” body type on social media looks like, how this tracks onto the features of the global beauty ideal (thin, firm, smooth, and young), and what this shows us about our aspirations to be impossibly perfect.3 Whilst the algorithms’ sole aim is to keep us scrolling, they give us beauty content because we’ve voted with our fingers and thumbs; this is the content we want to see. To tackle the harms of social media and its effects on our body image, we need to reflect on why we are so obsessed with the beauty ideal in the first place. Sure, social media algorithms are exacerbating the problem, but as yet they respond to human desires, desires they commodify and exacerbate, but not desires they create.

This post was originally published on this site