To those whose reaction to this story involves saying "I can't believe Instagram wrote that down", would you rather they not write it down? wsj.com/articles/faceb…
I see it as a testament to @mosseri's leadership that Instagram is willing to invest in understanding its impact on people-- both the good and the awful-- and spin up dedicated efforts to mitigate even the most intractable and heartbreaking harms.
The alternative would be an app that is blind to its role in society. That would be reckless and dangerous to us all. Instead, we need to engage with this research thoughtfully and bring to the conversation a spirit of constructive problem solving.
If we greet these findings with only outrage, it could have a chilling effect on internal research. Teams could be dissuaded from looking into tough questions, find their results overly sanitized, or limited in sharing what they found (even internally). That hurts everyone.
Of course there also needs to be more avenues for external research, new models for data sharing, and regulatory structures to make that mandatory. But let's also respect the work of internal researchers, whose insights are often the most influential critiques of all.
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