What Too Much Social Media is Doing to Girls

The guest details the Facetune ecosystem: an app where you manually slim jaw, enlarge eyes, tan skin, etc. The act of editing becomes compulsive because the 'undo' button reveals a version of yourself that now seems horrifying. Girls fight over which phone snaps the picture so they can be the editor, indicating loss of trust in unfiltered images. This behavior, combined with the dopamine of likes, creates an addictive loop that erodes comfort in real-world, unedited settings—leading to social anxiety. The guest's friends and she personally felt an aversion to having their picture taken naturally, illustrating how the control over appearance spills into avoidance of candid moments. By stopping, one can break the cycle and reduce the gap between digital and real self.

She argues that self-love campaigns often repackage products that encourage constant self-monitoring—like editing apps—as tools for confidence. The same pattern occurred with mental health awareness, which became a marketing angle. The solution is to differentiate between being told you'll feel a certain way and how you actually feel after using the product. She points to the example of Facetune influencers teaching face reshaping while preaching self-love, with no audience pushback. By consciously asking 'What am I being sold here?', a girl can short-circuit the automatic acceptance that this is love and see the transaction for what it is. This awareness can redirect effort away from digital alteration toward accepting unmediated reality.

She describes a dynamic where influencers make their entire brand a diagnosis, and followers then compete over who has the most severe combination of conditions. This 'race to the bottom of the iceberg' — comparing ADHD, autism, trauma — spreads through co-rumination on forums where girls already tend to ruminate more. The design of social media rewards the most extreme presentation, so the person who screams loudest about their suffering gets attention, which then reinforces the adoption of that identity. The guest is not dismissing mental health, but highlighting that the platform's incentives distort the natural process of healing into a performance that may cement an illness identity.

The guest points out that mental health awareness and self-love were turned into marketing. Facetune promoted itself as something that helps you feel confident and empowered, with influencers claiming they overcame insecurities while reshaping their faces on the app. No one in the comments calls out the hypocrisy because they've been taught that these actions equal self-love. The result is a cycle: girls Facetune, get dopamine from likes, then need to keep using it to maintain that appearance, leading to aversion to natural photos and social anxiety because the real world is uncontrollable. She parallels this to the pickup artist community: the edited self produces a minority of success but makes the gap between natural self and performed self deeply shameful. The act of editing doesn't build confidence but embarrasses, and girls often fight over whose phone to take the picture so they can control the editing.

The guest explains that the sheer number of influencers vying for attention forces each to 'up their game' with more extreme claims or content. A casual vlog might now casually include getting cosmetic surgery, making it seem a normal part of a beauty routine. Anti-aging content went from basic steps to 50-step routines aimed at ever-younger audiences; thumbnails declaring 'You need Botox at 17' perform better because they provoke shock and curiosity. This arms race is not limited to beauty: it happens in mental health, politics, and every topic on social media, dragging the platform's entire discourse to extremes. For a young girl who spends most of her waking hours on these apps, those extremes become her baseline reality—the information she absorbs about what is normal in beauty, relationships, and life.

The guest observes that while all influencers compete for attention, some build their entire brand around a mental health diagnosis—the ADHD influencer, the autism advocate. This creates an incentive to amplify and compete over diagnoses: users one-up each other, 'Oh, you think you've got ADHD? Well, I've got autism and ADHD.' This co-rumination, especially on platforms like Reddit, fosters an arms race of suffering where the most extreme presentation wins validation. Girls, who already ruminate more than boys, are particularly vulnerable. The platforms are designed to reward this escalation, turning a personal struggle into a public brand that can trap the person in an ever-expanding identity of illness. The guest jokes that the same escalation dynamic appears in conspiracy communities—a 'race to the bottom of the iceberg'—and it is equally damaging when applied to mental health.

The guest explicitly compares Facetune to the pickup artist movement popularized by Neil Strauss. She describes how men who learned 'game' often succeeded in getting sex but felt a profound gap between their natural and performed selves, making their normal self seem even more unwanted. The same dynamic happens with editing: a girl Facetunes a photo, gets 200 likes and a dopamine hit, but the gap between that fabricated ideal and her real face grows wider. She becomes addicted to the app and develops an aversion to having her picture taken without control. Her social anxiety increases because the real world cannot be edited—appearance, speech, interactions. The guest notes that friends would fight over which phone captured the photo so they could control the Facetuning, demonstrating the compulsion. Even the undo button in Facetune, which reveals the real image, becomes horrifying. Both paths—success or failure with the tool—lead to a feeling of inadequacy and reliance on the digital self.