Jaimie Nguyen’s use of Instagram begun harmlessly adequate in the seventh grade. There had been team chats to timetable conferences with her volleyball crew. She had exciting exploring for silly, sports-connected memes to share with good friends.
But rather immediately, Nguyen, now 16, began expending a large part of her weekday evenings scrolling by means of Instagram, TikTok or YouTube. She sought validation from people liking her posts and grew to become caught up in viewing the limitless loop of shots and videos that popped into her feeds, based mostly on her look for background. Disturbingly, some posts produced her