In March, the researchers said Instagram should reduce exposure to celebrity content about fashion, beauty and relationships, while increasing exposure to content from close friends, according to a slide deck they uploaded to Facebook’s internal message board. A current employee, in comments on the message board, questioned that idea, saying celebrities with perfect lives were key to the app. “Isn’t that what IG is mostly about?” he wrote. Getting a peek at “the (very photogenic) life of the top 0.1%? Isn’t that the reason why teens are on the platform?” A now-former executive questioned the idea of overhauling Instagram to avoid social comparison. “People use Instagram because it’s a competition,” the former executive said. “That’s the fun part.”
Elsewhere in the article, it says Facebook does not make the data available to outside researchers that they would need to really dig into potentially negative effects. This means public regulation based on public data is not going to be thorough or effective. In the absence of regulation, it's only Facebook's leadership and employees that can act on any findings, public or internal. Because of this, the mindset that tech industry people have on this issues is crucially important and disproportionately influential.