Teenage girls, body image and Instagram’s ‘perfect storm’

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.

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.