The suffering of the photo-sharing app’s users came into focus this week with the leak of Facebook’s internal research‘I felt my body wasn’t good enough’Emily started using
Instagram when she was in her mid-teens and found it helpful at first. She used the photo-sharing app to follow fitness influencers, but what began as a constructive relationship with the platform spiralled into a crisis centred on body image. At 19 she was diagnosed with an eating disorder.
![Teenage girls, body image and Instagram’s ‘perfect storm’](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/7d4845d3bd5fa5e26bbeacf4b9a855eaeafc01bc/0_2419_6496_3898/master/6496.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctZGVmYXVsdC5wbmc&enable=upscale&s=3b7702f725b896ec4475d54e157b3bff)
“I felt like my body wasn’t good enough, because even though I did go to the gym a lot, my body still never looked like the bodies of these influencers,” says Emily, now a 20-year-old a student who is in recovery.