Facebook is continuing to respond to a series of stories published by the Wall Street Journal which suggested the company knew its services had a negative impact on the well-being of teenage girls.

Slides produced by an internal research team reported by the newspaper suggested 32% of teenage girls said that Instagram made them feel worse about body image issues.

Last week, Facebook denied that it “conducts research and then systematically and wilfully ignores it if the findings are inconvenient for the company” as it paraphrased the reports.

In a new response, ahead of Facebook’s global head of safety appearing before a US Senate committee, the company said that contrary to the newspaper’s report, internal research found teenage girls said that the platform made them feel better rather than worse on 11 out of 12 well-being issues.

“It is simply not accurate that this research demonstrates Instagram is ‘toxic’ for teen girls,” the company’s head of research, Pratiti Raychoudhury, wrote.

“The research actually demonstrated that many teens we heard from feel that using Instagram helps them when they are struggling with the kinds of hard moments and issues teenagers have always faced,” Ms Raychoudhury added.

The other areas of the slide referenced by the newspaper including “loneliness, anxiety, sadness and eating issues” were made better by Instagram, the company’s research said.

Facebook denies ‘wilfully’ ignoring internal research if findings ‘inconvenient for the company’

Facebook and Ray-Ban launch range of smart glasses called Ray-Ban Stories

Facebook apologises after algorithm puts ‘primates’ label on video of black men

The company stressed: “Body image was the only area where teen girls who reported struggling with the issue said Instagram made it worse as compared to the other 11 areas.

“But here also, the majority of teenage girls who experienced body image issues still reported Instagram either made it better or had no impact.”

Facebook also said that the findings were based on the input from only 40 teens and were designed for an internal audience that understood the limitations of the research, and that the research was then used to inform product changes to make the platform better.

Related posts:

Psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms ‘promising’ for treating depression Emergency alerts for terror attacks, floods and other disasters to be sent directly to your phone Pfizer jab can now be stored in a fridge for one month, regulator says Cancelled launch won’t dampen hype around China’s ambitious plans for new space race Tinder to tackle catfishing with ID verification We Buy Any Car, Saga, and Sports Direct fined £495k for sending 354 million nuisance messages Ongoing Iceland volcanic eruption now the longest in 50 years People can be ‘fat but fit’ and should focus on exercise rather than dieting, experts say Throw away your Chinese phones, Lithuanian defence ministry tells citizens Babies have 10 times more microplastics in their poo than adults, study finds Elon Musk named Time magazine’s 2021 Person of the Year NASA probe ‘touches the sun’ in landmark spaceflight