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Neil Alleman English 101 Fall 2025 How Instagram Steals From Us Instagram is a money-hungry media powerhouse that exploits its consumers for profit, using manipulative practices; they steal our data, they steal our time, and most importantly, they steal our mental well-being. Instagram began like many other social media platforms as a place to share thoughts and ideas, mainly photos. Utilized to show off beauty in our day-to-day, to share experiences, and stay connected with our fellow. The tech behemoth it has become is far from what it once was. Built on an algorithm that shows you what you want when you want it, taking away the joy of finding a good post, we are now force-fed the same monotonous beauty, the same perfection day in, day out. Instagram stands to profit more and more from us; it’s only up from here that they pump our feed with ads and sell our data to allow those ads to be curated to us, just like the rest of the media on the app. Instagram is incentivized to keep us scrolling; the more time we spend, the more profit it makes. As we waste our time, they slip ads into our feed, collect more data on us, and curate more ads to us. The more time they can keep us stuck in their app, the more they can profit from us. Reels, being the perfect medium to nurture our addiction to their app, understand that they are hurting our mental health, but profit margins are all they care about. Social media is a catalog of beauty, stability, success, and popularity, where we get to witness greatness for free. What is the problem with that? It detracts from the beauty of daily life. Our achievements pale in comparison to the feats seen online; our mediocrity is constantly
brought to our attention. We are never thin enough, never muscular enough, never as skilled, never as funny, never as popular, never as successful, never as perfect. The facade of the internet never wavers; its virtual perfection is seen as reality. A false reality that staunchly sits within our minds, forcing us to wonder what we are missing, what we need to do to look like they do, wonder how they are far more skilled, far more successful, and wonder just why we aren’t perfect. Instagram understands this. They know that while we are envious, we also enjoy this content. Our FOMO leads to more time spent on a video trying to figure out what we aren’t doing, trying to see precisely what makes them different; they’re human too, we bleed the same color, so what makes their life seem so perfect? The Huffington Post addresses this point, citing a study statistic: “According to new research by disability charity Scope, 62% of Facebook and Twitter users felt their own achievements were inadequate when compared to the posts of others, and 60% said that the sites had made them jealous of other users.”(Huff Post). The majority of users felt inadequate after social media exposure, 60% feeling jealous of others. Instagram understands this and adds fuel to the fire, feeding on our depression. Forcing perfection down our throat and wondering why little girls have eating disorders, if all you consume is perfection, imperfections must be perfected, our idols appear perfect, so why aren't we perfect too? Our comparative nature and envious tendencies lead to more scrolls; we need a model for our perfect lives. When reality is compared to the virtual Potemkin village, our lives seem meager—we find beauty in nature and pose for it. We escape the monotony of our day-to-day by immersing ourselves in others' virtual lives. Envisioning ourselves in their virtual shoes and envious of them, oh, how those perfect shoes must fit. Instagram profits from its perfection and from your desire for it. The media uses influencers to market to us, flaunting their perfection to the masses, leveraging our envy to drive purchases. Products that promise perfection, ads that utilize the very
said differently to keep you from wanting to leave the platform. Instagram uses AI to help filter out spam messages to keep its users safe and their accounts secure.”(Kalinak, “How Instagram Keeps Users Scrolling for More.”) Every tidbit, anything perceivably useful, is collected on you, anything that they can use to shake a bone at manufacturers, earning 20 billion dollars in revenue from advertising alone. Not only do they care about consumers, but they also try to help us little guys, so we don't want to leave their honeypot. If you want to leave their app, they wouldn’t be as successful, so they throw us a bone and help to alleviate some of our annoyance with their app. Anastasia Micich, in her article titled “I Deleted My Instagram as a Teenager–Here’s Why,” points out similar issues to Kalanik regarding data collection and how Instagram is modeled around keeping you in the app. Revealing that when she requested her data from Instagram in the 7 days before her account's deletion, she had seen 222 ads. Almost 32 ads a day, depicting just how committed Instagram is to advertising to its consumers. Instagram needs our time; it requires our undivided attention. If they don’t have that, they cannot profit as much. In an article by Mansoor Iqbal titled “Instagram Revenue and Usage Statistics,” he uses a graph up to 2025 showing that Instagram’s revenue has grown a whopping 199.95% since the first quarter of 2021, around when Micich wrote her article. Leading one to assume they have only gotten better at collecting our data, better at targeting ads to consumers. Perhaps being one of the most widely used social media platforms, second only to Facebook, helps them market themselves to corporations, as their exposure relies on a large enough platform. Regardless, they make themselves more appealing to advertisers, as, unlike the third-most-used social media platform, WhatsApp, Instagram shamelessly sells your data to the highest bidder. Instagram is not all bad; they help us avoid scammers through AI
filtering, but what they do for us feels like an afterthought, just attempting to steal more of our time. Instagram needs our time; without our time, it makes no profit. Without our scrolls, we aren’t viewing ads; without ad viewership, advertisers won’t buy the ad space. It is so easy to fall into the scroll, and they have designed it with this purpose in mind. When we scroll, the app trains us to continue scrolling. It gives us videos we may like. If we don’t enjoy it, we scroll, we need the instant dopamine we itch for. This back-and-forth leads to a more refined data set that Instagram may profit from. They know the damage they are causing, and they double down, allowing their algorithm to harm consumers. “Doomscrolling: Stop the Scroll, Protect Your Mental Health.” Highlights how Instagram’s algorithm is detrimental to the user, Alisa Bowman describes the effects: You might feel okay when you first pick up your phone. After several minutes of scrolling, however, you feel more anxious, angry, disheartened, disgusted or helpless. Once this negativity arises, it functions like a lens, causing you to pay more attention to stories and posts that justify and accentuate your feelings, says Dr, Sawchuk. Instagram knows that humans inherently have cognitive biases, so it has designed its algorithm around this fact, preying on our minds, allowing its algorithm to expose us to negative content that only hurts us, as our brain’s natural response to stress is to look for more danger, the more negative content they expose us to, the longer we sit in their app. Recently, they introduced a swiping feature that lets you immediately swipe left and enter the domain of the doomscroll, an endless pit of entertainment. Arora, in their article, “5 Ways Instagram Keeps Us Hooked,” points out how Instagram is designed and continues to design itself to get users hooked and waste their days away:
may hold in store for you. The algorithm is blatantly harmful to consumers, intentionally exposing us to negative content, so it can gluttonously consume our data to make better quarterly profits. Instagram must stop using practices that hurt consumers, manipulate them, waste their lives away, and are motivated almost solely by greed. Instagram works every waking minute to exploit us for profit, trapping us within its app to strip us of any data we may provide. After all the research I have done, I will be deleting the app, so what if I miss a few DM’s? I need to reclaim my life. I have been addicted to Instagram for far too long, and I hope that after reading this article, if you, too, have a problem, this will be the motivation you need to delete the app. They profit from our wasted hours, days, and even weeks. Sooner or later, even if not, they will find a way to get you hooked, even if you manage your time well. That is their business model: get you hooked, then profit, profit, and more profit. And they don’t care who it hurts, physically or mentally, they will watch as your data shows a happy-go-lucky kid slowly slip down the incel rabbit hole and then market sex dolls to them, observe as a little girl goes from watching for fun to watching videos on how to get skinny quickly. Instagram just sits and watches, collecting data on them as they both spiral in opposite directions until they crash.
Works Cited: Alisa Bowman. “Doomscrolling: Stop the Scroll, Protect Your Mental Health.” Mayo Clinic Press , 18 Apr. 2024, mcpress.mayoclinic.org/mental-health/doom-scrolling-and- mental-health/. Curry, David. “Instagram Revenue and Usage Statistics (2025) - Business of Apps.” Instagram Revenue and Usage Statistics (2025) , 20 Nov. 2025, www.businessofapps.com/data/instagram-statistics/. Accessed 02 Dec. 2025. D., Thuy. “Biggest Social Media Platforms by Users 2025.” Statista , 19 Nov. 2025, www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/? srsltid=AfmBOorSLtmYW43kNos3uEE3ib96v4DY5Wbg6xD44DIwXY_efJnyiIIJ. Accessed 02 Dec. 2025. Garber, Leon. “Envy Addiction: How Using Social Media to Make Others Jealous Makes Everyone Miserable.” Leon’s Existential Cafe , 15 Feb. 2021, existentialcafe.blog/2021/02/11/envy-addiction-how-using-social-media-to-make-others- jealous-makes-everyone-miserable/. Accessed 01 Dec. 2025. Hardymon, Barrie, and Michelle Aslam. “‘adolescence’ Is a Parental Nightmare. Here’s What to Tell Kids about Online Extremism.” NPR , 3 Apr. 2025, www.npr.org/2022/06/28/1108124938/learn-the-signs-of-radicalization-and-how-to-talk- to-kids-about-it. Accessed 02 Dec. 2025. Kalanik, Julia. “How Instagram Keeps Users Scrolling for More.” Digital Innovation and Transformation , 22 Mar. 2021, d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/how-instagram- keeps-users-scrolling-for-more/. Accessed 01 Dec. 2025. Micich, Anastasia. “I Deleted My Instagram as a Teenager - Here’s Why.” PIRG , 22 June 2023, pirg.org/articles/instagram-bad-for-teens/. Accessed 20 Nov. 2025.
