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The apple pay sound for me in particular sparked the whole issue around social media based consumerism and how social media giants such as Instagram, TikTok etc essentially scam/tricking young people out of cash for absolutely useless products. This kills the initial idea of what the apps were intended for being creativity and instead secretly preying on the younger audience targeting them as they are the most venerable and most willing to buy into anything especially if its advertised by their favourite influencer.

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My friend explained his experience with scamming on instagram again harping back to the toxicity of instagram today. Oriental drift is the account he's referring to. https://www.instagram.com/orientaldrift/

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I also want to note that another aspect of this issue is that Instagram users may always compare themselves to an influencer therefor buying any product the influencer has advertised, this in turn then boost's there self esteem, depression and social anxiety. They become hypnotised and OBSESSED!

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As well as social giants and influencers instagram can be a hub for fraudsters.
-Fraudsters have been using apps to scam young people out of over £3 million
-It’s believed that 356 people have been scammed out of an average of £8,900 each, usually starting with an initial investment of £600

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Fraudsters have been using apps to scam young people out of over £3 million, warns ActionFraud.

These get-rich-quick investment scams have been luring people in their 20s into 'investing' money, with high returns promised after just 24 hours.

It's believed that 356 people have been scammed out of an average of £8,900 each, usually starting with an initial investment of £600. They are then being conned into transferring even more money as they are shown fake images of their money 'growing'.

A spokesperson for Instagram said: 'Fake and fraudulent activity is not allowed on Instagram. We proactively fight against this type of content and are always improving our systems to quickly detect and remove anything that violates our Community Guidelines.'

How to stay safe when scrolling

Tech expert Carrie-Anne Skinner advises that these scams are often 'sponsored' posts, so look for that wording at the top of the image.

If it seems too good to be true, it probably is! But if you're still tempted then research the company thoroughly. Always check the credentials of any financial company on the Financial Conduct Authority's (FCA) website: - they should be on the register.

As usual with any web based scams - don't transfer money to people you don't know! These types of requests should always raise a red flag. If something feels wrong then it is usually right to question it.

Report anything you're suspicious of, or if you're the victim of a crime, to ActionFraud.

For more brilliant money-saving advice, sign up to the Financially Fabulous newsletter HERE
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The Instagram scam tricking young people out of cash

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Fraudsters have been using apps to scam young people out of over £3 million, warns ActionFraud. These get-rich-quick investment scams have been luring people in their 20s into 'investing' money, with high returns promised after just 24 hours. It's believed that 356 people have been scammed out of an average of £8,900 each, usually starting with an initial investment of £600.

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-Seeing a product continuously worn by an influencer, who's life looks desirable is the trigger for a consumer to say 'I want that item now'
- Social psychologists and journalist call the above 'lifestyle envy' which every young adult is a victim of
-social media envy, is driving consumerism in new ways
- social media consumerism has shifted traditional values of an ideal life for people
- 54% of young adults in America said that becoming social media famous is more desirable than becoming wealthy showing that social media consumerism is affecting peoples strain of thought
- sometimes young adults/teenagers can feel peer pressured online to buy into things

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Editor's note: This article is part of "The Ten Today," a series that examines the Ten Commandments in modern society. This story explores the tenth commandment: "Thou shalt not covet."
It's hard to say how many hours a week Erin Wilson spends on social media. She's on Twitter, Facebook and a sprinkling of online dating apps, but her favorite is the photo-sharing social network app Instagram.

Wilson, a professional stage actress and singer, leads what looks like a glamorous life traveling with Broadway shows like "Wicked" and "Sister Act," and she has two Instagram accounts: a personal account that documents her everyday life performing or living in New York City, and one that chronicles her home shopping trips. The second, which goes by the Instagram handle homegoodsobsessed, has 4,000 followers. She is in the process of launching a third account, prettyeasyco, for hair and makeup tips.

Wilson is a savvy user of social media, but she's a consumer, too. She just bought a trendy crochet swimsuit, for example, that she saw on Nordstrom.com. It wasn't the marketing that sold her; it was seeing the image again and again on Pinterest and Instagram.

"You see it once and you think, 'That's cute.' It's seeing it repeatedly, and on people whose life looks desirable, that puts you over into 'I have to have that,'" she said.

There's a term for this. Social psychologists, journalists and social-media users call it "lifestyle envy," or Instagram envy, and savvy smartphone users are well-acquainted with its tell-tale sign: the little pang you get when a friend posts photos from his or her swanky vacation in Istanbul, or when actress Mindy Kaling snaps her newest pair of spike-toe Christian Louboutain pumps.

Envy has long been a concern of civilization, mentioned in the Ten Commandments, the seven deadly sins and countless other works down to present day America, in which the newest iteration, social media envy, is driving consumerism in new ways. According to a study by New York marketing communications firm JWT, fame and fortune are currently replacing faith and family as the core of the American Dream. Two-thirds of Americans in the study said traditional notions of the ideal life - community, religious faith and middle-class values - have shifted.

"More Americans see the ability to spend - whether by accumulating wealth or accessing credit - as a component of the American Dream," the study indicates. Also, 58 percent of respondents said "becoming wealthy" is key to the American Dream for them personally; 54 percent said "social recognition and status" were a big part of it for people today. A quarter said a big part of the dream for them was "becoming famous." Traditional ideals of the good life such as "getting married" and "attending religious services" were more likely to be categorized as part of a past definition of the American Dream than as part of the present one.

Instagram alone, which became a social media phenomenon by allowing people to transform ordinary photos into magazine-shoot images with fancy filters and then share them with others, grew last year from 80 million to 150 million users worldwide. Are Americans becoming coveting, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses consumers one perfectly filtered post at a time?

People are inspired by comparing themselves to peers through social media, and that is why they feel a little lift when they see an image of a friend triumphantly crossing a finish line or a co-worker's twins happily hugging. But people also become hyper-aware of the achievements and success of those peers, said Ann Mack, director of trendspotting at JWT Worldwide. Thus cuts the double-edged sword of social media.

Traditional advertising is losing some of its power over consumers who instead look to one another for trends and opinions, she said.

"If you think about 100 years ago, people would go to the town dance and see what the Joneses are doing. This comparison has always been around," Wilson said. "But now you can do it on an extreme scale. You can compare yourself to thousands of people."

And it's not just celebrities that people are comparing themselves to - it's one another as well.

Not only that, but Twitter and Facebook have brought down the wall that separated actors, musicians and athletes from the rest of the world. Now anyone can see even more closely the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Sometimes, social media blurs the lines between peers and stars, Wilson said, because people are able to package their lives on social media as though they are celebrities.

"Instagram makes our peers' lives look glamorous, but almost attainable. If Beyonce has something, that's one thing, but if a friend does, it's almost in reach - or feels like it should be," Wilson said.

The term for this kind of comparison is "relative deprivation," a sociological term that refers to the dissatisfaction that people feels when they compare their 3-year-old's Buzz Lightyear birthday, for example, to their friend's party with letter-pressed invitations, homemade cupcakes and customized muslin juice box bags all captured by a professional photographer.

It doesn't matter that these are middle-class problems. People compare their positions to others and grasp that they have less, Mack said: "Social media is bringing us closer to the upper echelons yet simultaneously back down to reality."

Susan T. Fiske, social psychology professor at Princeton University and author of " Envy Up, Scorn Down: How Status Divides Us," said envied groups include high-status people, such as the rich and wealthy entrepreneurs. Studies find that people deem them competent but "not on our side," and therefore "cold and exploitative."

Fiske has studied envy using brain scans, and in one of her favorite experiments, subjects watch images of investment bankers encountering bad luck (such as stepping in gum or getting splashed by a car), and they smile. This Schadenfreude (malicious glee) "activates the reward areas of the brain," according to Fiske, when subjects see envied others receive bad outcomes.

Comparison - to co-workers, neighbors, friends or social media contacts - is part of human nature, Fiske said. People need to know where they stand in social hierarchies, and the best way to do it is by gleaning that information from peers. Traditionally, envy has played a different role in American culture because of the American Dream and the notion that everyone has equal access to success and opportunity, she said.

"If you work hard enough and keep your nose clean, you will advance. That's part of our American culture," Fiske said, but because of her research, she now thinks attitudes about envy may be changing in the U.S.

"Everyone likes to think that they are middle-class, but that simply isn't true anymore," she said. In fact, about one-third of people move up in social class in their lifetimes, while one-third stay where they are at and one-third move down.
Out-smarting comparison
Americans are becoming aware of social inequality, and it can pique envy, Fiske said.

"Until Occupy Wall Street, we had a tendency to deny social class - before, it was only sociologists that would acknowledge it," Fiske said. "Now people realize that the middle class is shrinking and (their) share of wealth is shrinking."

Marcia Reynolds had a compulsive need for a bigger house. She moved again and again, she acknowledges now, despite living in a number of great homes.

Reynolds finds she falls victim to envy like anyone else, even though she's an expert on the subject. She's a psychologist and author of "Outsmart Your Brain" and has explored the topic of jealousy and competition.

"It is amazing, globally, the awareness of having to have the best," Reynolds said. "It'll kill you moneywise unless you have an endless stream - but then psychologically there's always going to be someone who has more and looks better. So when does it end?

"If I'm saying, 'I need to have that,' or 'Why should other people have that and not me,' then on the flip side that means if I don't have that I'm not good enough," Reynolds said. "We start really devaluing ourselves in the process."

Andrea Mouritsen is a blogger turned Instagrammer. She loves the quick hit of feedback and keeping in touch with friends and family. What she doesn't love is the consumerism, especially "blog swag," or the free stuff that bloggers get and then post to social media.

"There's a photo of them pushing an $1,800 stroller while a professional photographer follows them," she said. "It feels very staged."

Still, it's easy to be affected by it, she said: "Suddenly, I feel like my stroller is a piece of crap, and it puts me in a state of annoyance."
Reality check
She knows logically that those people couldn't afford those things if they didn't get them for free, but she has stopped following those kinds of feeds.

"I clicked away feeling a little down," she said. "So now I like to find things that are uplifting, or make me think or make me happy."

Part of the allure of the Instagram image is that it purports to represent a person's "real" life. Wilson, who artfully curates her own photos, has to remind herself it's still manufactured.

She offers an Instagram image that she just posted on her phone. It's a photo of half her face; her eyes are lined in black, her eyebrows arched and her lips pop in a perfect movie-star red.

"In editing, this is what I ended up with," she said. "Could I sell this red lipstick to anybody? Yes. Is that legitimately 100 percent what it looks like? No. It's touched up. It's an ideal. You're giving somebody something to aspire to. That's an immediate sell."

The seeming ease with which people can acquire beauty, a perfectly styled home or even fame and success becomes skewed, said Jean Twenge, author of "Generation Me" and a professor of psychology who noticed that the 20-somethings in her undergraduate classes were inundated with messages about self-esteem. Young people in particular grew up with the idea that people like Justin Bieber get famous over YouTube, and there's a feeling that anyone can be famous in a moment, she said.

"I amend that phrase 'You can be anything you want to be,'" Twenge said. "You can be anything you want to be as long as you have the talent, you work really hard and you get some luck along the way. It's not as pithy, but it's a lot more accurate."

On the upside, aspirational thinking helps counterbalance the disheartening economic realities that young people face, Mack said. They have an entrepreneurial mindset facilitated by technology. YouTube and Twitter spread original, creative ideas quickly, and if a person has a good business idea, he or she can get it funded on Kickstarter.

Wilson turned her Internet shopping habits into a business idea. She had just come off a bad breakup, and she poured herself into furnishing her apartment. She checked sale sites for home goods daily, but there was a time where she had to hit the brakes. "I said to myself, 'You have enough. You're done. You don't need it - this is becoming obsessive.' "

She realized that she could use the shopping impulse to chronicle products that she loves on Instagram and share them with other people. Not only is her Home Goods feed - which features discounted and sale products - popular with other would-be buyers, but it satisfies that acquisition craving: "I wouldn't think of it as coveting, but I guess that's what it is," she said.

But someone doesn't have to actually buy things to scratch that itch, she said. Most of the fun is in the looking. Half the time, she finds herself sending back things she bought. Now her Instagram feed allows her to "collect" the things that she wants without opening her wallet.

She thinks of it as a service, not another envy-inducing feed of beautiful, unattainable objects.

"Looking at pretty things on the Internet doesn't have to be a bad thing," she said. "It can inspire you."

Likewise, Fiske said emotions such as envy and scorn are adaptive, evolved responses, but people can control them. If a peer wins a prize, some people can interpret it as being bad for them, or it can be interpreted as good for the group, she said.

She's hopeful that envy can be used for good if people adopt "benign envy," or being inspired by someone's example: "Comparison becomes a problem when we forget that we're all in this together," she said.

Email: laneanderson@deseretnews.com

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The Instagram effect: How the psychology of envy drives consumerism

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Editor's note: This article is part of "The Ten Today," a series that examines the Ten Commandments in modern society. This story explores the tenth commandment: "Thou shalt not covet." It's hard to say how many hours a week Erin Wilson spends on social media.

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- 72% of users report making purchase decisions based on something they saw on Instagram
-Compared to Snapchat (1%), Twitter (3%), Pinterest (22%) and Facebook (23%), the platform has the most influence on shopping habits, at 51%: this is because of the new shopping feature which is destroying the platform now slowly turning into a shop
-71% of marketers want to learn more about Instagram: again another negative point destroying the initial creativity point of the app

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72% Of Users Make Purchase Decisions Based On Instagram Content - Retail TouchPoints

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Instagram is quickly becoming the channel to reach shoppers and develop influencer marketing strategies that pay off: 72% of users report making purchase decisions based on something they saw on Instagram; Compared to Snapchat (1%), Twitter (3%), Pinterest (22%) and Facebook (23%), the platform has the most influence on shopping habits, at 51%; and 71% [...]

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- We found 35% of U.S. shoppers between the coveted age of 18-29 use Instagram to research or buy health and beauty products
-With more than 25 million businesses actively using Instagram to market to their target audience, it’s easy to see why so many people use the app to shop: this number is shocking, although this may help instagrams value sky rocket its only tarnishing and ruining habits of youngsters
- Instagram and other now consumerism based apps can easily target their audience tracking their interests and behaviours really taking advantage of their younger consumers
- instagram has recently been bombarded with ads popping up everywhere

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Instagram is more than just a way to get jealous about your friend's vacation photos. Although it hurts to see those travel images while you sit at work, the benefits of Instagram is far reaching.

Just think about the massive amounts of new products and services you've likely discovered on Instagram through paid social media ads or friends tagging brands you've never heard of in their posts. Of course social media connects us, but what's difficult is getting those connections to your most important business assets-your customers.

At the same time, we know creating, managing and maintaining an Instagram account is daunting. It takes significant time and consideration to not only make it work, but drive sales.

Before you say-we just don't have the resources-consider this data from an upcoming PowerReviews health and beauty report. We found 35% of U.S. shoppers between the coveted age of 18-29 use Instagram to research or buy health and beauty products.

For certain industries, leaving Instagram out of your buyer journey could seriously limit your ability to reach new customers. So to help you get on the right track, we're providing a few tips. Here are seven benefits of Instagram that you might not know:

1. More Businesses & Consumers Are Joining Every Day

With more than 25 million businesses actively using Instagram to market to their target audience, it's easy to see why so many people use the app to shop. In today's instant-access retail world, shoppers want visual content to help them make buying decisions.

Not only do they want visuals, but consumers want this content from people just like them.

In fact, the PowerReviews Ecommerce Snapshot report found 72% of U.S. shoppers search for visual content of an item before making the purchase. On the flip side, a menial 3% of shoppers said they never look for visuals before buying.

The growing network of Instagram actually helps brands and retailers leverage visuals to better describe and detail their products. And as the network increases, shoppers understand that Instagram can be a reliable source for more product information and visuals.

That means your target audience is already primed to see your content show up in their feed. Not only do you customers expect it, but Instagram has made their app much more business-friendly in the last few years with various linking, landing page creation and product tagging features.

Simply put, the company is giving you fewer reasons for your business not to join. The customer experience is important to so many brands and retailers, which is why Instagram continues to push these features. The benefits of Instagram grows with its user base, so it just might be time to join or significantly improve your marketing strategy.

2. Easy to Target (and Retarget) Your Audience

We know that targeting the right audience is key in the success of your ads. But how does Instagram help you reach your core audience?

Well, if you're familiar at all with Facebook advertising, you understand the power and depths available to reach your audience. Some of the targeting features include:

Location: Whether you're targeting to a whole country or just one city, location isn't any issue.

Demographics: Want to send your ads only to 37-year-old women who speak Catalan? Instagram can pinpoint language and gender demographics.

Interests: Base your ads on what your audience follows on Instagram, including other businesses that may be your direct competition. You also can base interests on ads they click and apps they use.

Behaviors: Define an ad's audience by the actions they take on (and off) Instagram and Facebook. For example, easily retarget potential customers who have visited your website in the past but never made a purchase.

Lookalike audiences: Your followers are part of a specific persona who is eager to see your content (and hopefully buy your products). So, you can target ads to people that are similar to the ones that already follow you or have purchased on your website.

Instagram also offers automated targeting, giving you a head start in creating an audience that might be interested in your brand. To get even more information, check out our Instagram sizes and advertising dimensions guide!

Understanding Your Demographics

One of the biggest questions businesses have is about their core demographics and where they shop. For Instagram, many brands and retailers chalk it up to a young-person's game.

But Pew Research recently found 40% of U.S. adults between 30-49 use Instagram and an overall 35% of adults use the app.

It's important to not only know your core demographic, but provide them the right channels to shop for your products. We already know that younger generations like Instagram, but targeting older demographics that might be more relevant to your brand is essential.

3. Use All the Visual Marketing Features on Instagram

Like we mentioned, visual content empowers shoppers to make purchases with more in-depth details and images of what they want to buy. But that doesn't mean you should just add photos and videos of your products every day and call it a day.

Retailers are getting much smarter to how and where they advertise to shoppers on Instagram. Additionally, brands and retailers are creating better content on the platform because they're focusing on the correct Instagram sizes and features that users actually enjoy.

For example, Overstock relies on Instagram Story ads to beautifully transition consumers to featured products in just a few seconds.

As part of the process of repositioning their brand, Overstock created these video ads and saw an 18% increase in return on ad spend and a 20% decrease in cost per click. Creating engaging content is about capturing shoppers' attention before they scroll or tap past your message.

To get the most out of your Instagram content, try these tips:

Use large text: Don't make it difficult for viewers to make out your message on their mobile devices. However, using too much might get an ad rejected.

Be succinct: No reason to try out your best Faulkner impersonation. The last thing you want to do is make your pitch 2 or 3 seconds into the ad. You have to give the value prop immediately.

Avoid over designing: The point of your ad should be to blend in with user content. Sometimes it pays to not use overly-designed content.

Create a clear path: With Instagram shopping, users can review products before moving to your site. Create seamless and easy paths to limit any second-guessing.

4. Engage With Customers Where They Spend Their Time

More than 800 million people use Instagram every month and over 500 million log on every day. The time spent on Instagram is pretty astonishing and for brands and retailers, this is a network to engage and connect with your base.

This is telling because approximately 80% of all Instagram accounts follow at least one business. The visual network is perfect for brands who don't want to be bombarded by sales copy, announcements and other messaging. Instead, Instagram works like it does when you follow your friends-if you see visual content you like, you engage.

King Arthur Flour does a great job at highlighting visual content that could be easily mistaken for a friend or family account. And the best part is that it's not tricking users, but simply blending in the content to be discovered.

Instagram found that 60% of users have found a new product on the platform. It continues to be the platform for discovery and new product education. So why not use Instagram for what it's intended for?

5. Build Up User-Generated Content

User-generated content is an essential part of building trust in your brand and products. Why? Because people trust each other more than businesses.

The same Ecommerce Snapshot report found 54% of U.S. consumers between ages 18-29 said consumer-submitted photos and videos were more valuable than retail or brand visual content. And again, younger shoppers are not the only demographic looking for user-generated content. Approximately half of those between the ages 30-44 felt the same way.

And on Instagram, it's not only a gold mine of user-generated content, but it's easy to get it produced from your audience. Brands like Southwest regularly promote user-generated content submitted from their loyal customers.

It's easy to ask for content through a hashtag to build up content and get your followers engaged. And the best part is you have the ability to collect and display Instagram user-generated content through the PowerReviews Visual and Social Suite to reinforce your product pages with authentic customer content.

Give customers a way to see your products in the hands of or on shoppers just like themselves. By doing so, you limit doubt and increase confidence in their path to purchase.

6. Reveals In-Depth Insights About Your Audience

We now know how important it is to understand and learn your audience. And to know who they are, where they're from and their likes and dislikes, Instagram can help uncover this information.

First, being engaged in the community online helps you see what these people are all about. By following popular hashtags in your industry, you'll see what people are talking about, their concerns and problems, as well as their happy moments and daily victories.

Second, Instagram provides essential native insights into your community and followers.

With these Insights, you'll find information about your followers such as their gender, age, location and the times when they're most active online.

Lastly, Instagram also gives you insights to see your ROI on the platform. If you've ever used the ads manager platform on Facebook, you'll understand the kind of super-useful information it provides.

For each campaign, you can check reach, clicks, sales, or conversions, plus the total conversion value. You can also break this down by factors such as gender or location.

7. Constantly Updated Marketing Features Within Ads and Stories

Instagram knows you want to sell more products and raise brand awareness. They understand your goals to improve your Instagram marketing strategy and the platform gives you the tools to accomplish them.

On the other hand, Instagram also knows their users. They understand how people spend money online. In fact, 42% of women on Instagram in the U.S. said they love to shop and consider it a hobby.

That's why major retailers like Dick's Sporting Goods does stellar work on Instagram to make it completely easy to click, search and buy. The social network created shopping and marketing experiences as an integrated part of their platform specifically to allow brands to advertise without obstructing the process of the platform.

At the same time, running Instagram Story ads lets you add links and product tag widows to learn more in an instant. The constant updates tailored toward businesses make this one of the hottest spots for retailers and brands to showcase their products.

Since launching this feature, over 90 million accounts are tapping product tags to reveal details every single month. With ads that appear in the feed, you can attach links with CTAs like "Shop Now" to encourage shoppers to leave their feed.

How Will You Use These Benefits of Instagram?

Now that you know a few important benefits of Instagram, what will you do with the tips? Remember, Instagram is one of the best places to engage with your target audience and connect through visual content.

Plus, business-specific features such as business profiles, targeted ad campaigns, incredibly detailed insights and shopping buttons in stories and in-feed ads help you get the most out of this platform while boosting your ROI.

Discover the features and let us know on Twitter how you use Instagram to benefit your business!

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7 Benefits of Instagram Brands Likely Don't Know | PowerReviews

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Instagram is more than just a way to get jealous about your friend's vacation photos. Although it hurts to see those travel images while you sit at work, the benefits of Instagram is far reaching.

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What social media consumerism can lead to in young adults/teenagers:
- Social Comparison
- Social Anxiety
- Self-Esteem
- lost/fake identity

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Subproblem 2: Instagram shopping feature? When will they stop?

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Subproblem 2: Instagram shopping feature? When will they stop?

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Another issue that has come alight with the initial issue is the fact that instagram has now added a shopping tab making it much easier to buy from the app. I defiantly feel this is not needed but this is a very two sided argument. This was addressed by many people online as not being needed and a obvious way that reveals the true consumerism intentions of the social media giant. Looking at this is unfortunate but now instagram has basically taken its creativity away and turned the app into a social shop app like Depop when in turns it doesn't need to be. It also has info about you so can edit the shop to things you like, which is even worse.

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The trickery of instagram consumerism has created this unhealthy emotion known as Envy, which mentioned before creates the issue with young people of comparing themselves ultimately resulting in them bringing harm upon themselves (or sometimes other individuals).

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Here i ask my friend what he thinks of the recently established Instagram shop feature. I don't want to pull him under the bus but by what he said i feel as though he has been consumed by the consumerism as he has a couple of times bought from instagram.

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Part 1: Another of my friends giving his opinion on the shopping edit on instagram.

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Part 2

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Part 3

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Another friends opinion much different to the previous.

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This article helps me understand fully all the other issues the shopping features adds to the roulette such as physical health, traumatic events. Social media companies’ access to such sensitive information is a concern, for how the companies could exploit the information and the risk of third-party access to the data.

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Instagram's redesign shifts toward shopping - here's how that can be harmful

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Recently, when I opened Instagram, I noticed that the usual spot for checking notifications is now a Shop tab. The Instagram blog post announcing the redesign said that the change will support small businesses and connect people with their favorite brands and creators. This made me pause.

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When researching if a solution has come to tackling consumerism on social media, not many if actually no results come up as battling these huge corporations into perhaps removing the shop edit on instagram is a no go for them. To the big corporations it would be a huge loss for them as they have put a huge amount of money into the shopping edit. But looking at instagram who are owned by facebook, they already have a successful businesses on Facebook marketplace so they could remove all ads on instagram and perhaps make a whole new app dedicated to selling, something similar to Depop but a more influencer focused edition. This would make the situation a bit better as then young people can go on instagram purely for enjoyment and socially interacting and leave the selling to this new app.

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Ive been thinking about the last post a-lot and i think a better solution to this situation that can be applied even to the likes of TikTok is a more edited and healthier feed to instagram. Obviously it's too hard to convince a huge company to remove paid content so perhaps they cold scrap the shopping feature, but keep influencer paid advertisements. The advertisements would need to stick to new guidelines made by their partner company Facebook. So for example they are only allowed to advertise products that are either beneficial or educational. So no weird advertisements of useless products or of these 'fake pills' that are sometimes advertised that convince people that it can make them loose weight or look better. As everyone using the app is great as they are and don't need any negativity as life is hard enough anyway, so positive products would be great to advertise to the instagram consumers/audience. This should hopefully bring back the initial creativity and fun concept once again to the app. This will declutter the app a-lot as well.

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New app creation i mocked up to give instagram a AD free feed keeping all the toxic consumerism away. 'Shop the gram' brings the instagram shopping edit to a new app completely dedicated to shopping. Keeping these apps separate will help tackle the issue of social media consumerism keeping young people on instagram away from the temptation giving them a better mental state.