Facebook says Instagram is not ‘toxic for teens,’ despite damning WSJ report

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Facebook has fired back nearly two weeks after The Wall Street Journal reported that Instagram made body image issues worse for one in three teenage girls according to Facebook’s own data. The salvo comes courtesy of Pratiti Raychoudhury, Vice President, Head of Research at Facebook. Raychoudhury’s post on Facebook’s Newsroom claims that The Wall Street Journal’s characterization of internal research is “not accurate” and blames it all on a poor interpretation of the data the WSJ has in its possession.

On September 14 The Wall Street Journal published a story to The Facebook Files, which is a series of stories based around an enormous cache of internal Facebook documents leaked to the newspaper. The September 14 piece focused on data...

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