my name is ricky schlot and i was 11 years old when i joined instagram i was constantly checking and i would say that probably over the span of a day was three four hours that i poured into these apps it really became this constant bombardment of the highlight reel of everyone else's life it used to be back in the day you'd see a magazine and you'd say oh she's so beautiful but now this magazine is following you around and it's in your pocket i was looking and scrolling through and seeing these idealized versions of other people and that was detrimental to my own self-worth and confidence my sense of self was developing in this kind of bizarre duality between instagram ricky and real life ricky looking back i'm missing a lot of photos of just being a kid and just being authentic and real [Music] when i was younger i didn't really care as much about what people thought of me and my instagram account but now i feel like that kind of affects me a little bit more when you're like feeling at your worst and then you go on instagram and you see models influences celebrities things like that and you're just like oh well i'll never be like that [Music] social media can exploit the parts of our brain that get us to connect with other humans our brains get us to make those human connections by releasing dopamine in the reward pathway which is the feel good neurotransmitter and what happens with certain types of social media apps is that they release so much dopamine in the reward pathway that they essentially become the equivalent of an addictive drug i really relied on having that constant access to my account as a sort of fail-safe for when i was feeling particularly low about myself so that i could have people bring me back up again other people's judgments become very very salient for the adolescent brain and that makes adolescents more vulnerable to the reinforcing and addictive potential of social media the more i've reflected on it the more i realized that social media is designed to be addicting and it gets better at addicting people every day the company's leadership knows how to make facebook an instagram saver but won't make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people [Music] i'm concerned when any team has a bad experience on instagram but i want to be clear that that is not what these stolen documents say here's another survey pew research found in late 2018 26 said the sites make them feel worse about their own life there are plenty of other surveys we could point to a quarter of children that are on this site so it makes them feel worse and again anytime a single teen is having a bad experience that's too much that's why we ask these questions one thing that shows that we are prioritizing safety about profit is the very fact that we're asking these hard questions [Music] [Music] control means you're using much more than you plan to use compulsion means that there's a level of automaticity you find yourself picking it up without even thinking about doing it and then consequences it's interfering with things like sleep exercise when i decided to pull back from it it was it was a moment of clarity and i still used them maybe less than an hour a day because i do think that they're they're part of the language of being a gen xer you can't connect with people without some degree of online presence we really need to take this moment to say our childhoods were stolen but we're now young adults and reclaiming that and not allowing that to become a habit that continues into adulthood is enormously important for our well-being [Music] you