Alix Glaenzer and her mother Virginie discuss how Instagram bullying left Alix anxious and embarrassed at school, with peers posting negative comments on her photos. Snapchat's private messages felt safer than Instagram's public, anonymous audience where harassers are hard to identify. The psychological fallout included self-consciousness, reduced posting, and PTSD-like symptoms.
Chapters
So, um, Snapchat I wouldn't say would be as bad as Instagram.
I think that Snapchat is a little bit more personal because you typically Snapchat specific people, so you wouldn't have to talk to everyone. You wouldn't have to talk to someone that you don't want to. It's really just more of you communicating with individual people that you don't have their phone number. So that one I more had an issue with being self-conscious and taking photos of myself. But Instagram, I did have a lot of instances in high school where someone would make an Instagram page just to talk bad about me.
I've had people post photos of me and like start commenting, and then you would see everyone that you knew would comment, and then you'd have to go to school the next say, um, it did get pretty hard and I'm trying not to cry.
No, don't cry. Yeah, but so how do you— I mean, how do you deal with this? Do you go to a school, an adult?
I mean, with the Instagram, it's a little harder to go to someone on the outside of it because after a while it is just everyone being online and You know, it's harder to target someone when they don't really have a username that, you know, you can find.
And even when you do know who it is, confronting it is a little bit harder than it seems because it is—
it's harder to—
it's easier to say something online than it is to the person and to the person, person to person.
So essentially, when you do know who is saying what about you, You don't necessarily want to go and be like, why did you do this?
Because it's just a conversation that essentially could make you feel worse. It'll give you more anxiety. It's, it's just, it's social media itself can help people target you. And I think that that's what really affected me the most and is the reason why I have become more of a self-conscious person. I don't post as much.
I can feel a little bit uncomfortable when I'm meeting people.
So I think that there is some PTSD with social media that I've experienced, but obviously I can't take it to an extreme extent because I know there's so much worse things that happen to people, and social media is really something that we shouldn't be, like, crying about and all this. So it's a shame that it had to be— in my opinion, social media had to be something that became negative at such a quick time when it just came out.
