The Sconi

Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) joined Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) authoring a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri, asking them about content moderation and advertising strategies.

The letter follows testimony from Frances Haugen, who previously worked for Facebook, in which she discussed leaked internal data that showed 17% of female teen Instagram users said Instagram worsened their eating disorders, and 32% said Instagram increased negative feelings they have about their bodies, told by Teen Vogue.

“Facebook knows they’re leading young users to anorexia content," Baldwin said in an Oct. 18 tweet. "Eating disorders have one of the highest mortality rates of any mental illness and social media is glorifying it. More has to be done to protect kids from being exposed to this content.”

In addition to having a detrimental effect on body image, social media can contribute to depression, anxiety and feelings of isolation. A 2015 Common Sense survey found that there are teenagers who spend as much as nine hours every day on the internet. A 2017 Canadian study found that users who spent more than 2 hours on social media a day were more likely to rate their mental health as “poor” or “fair," told by Medical News Today.

According to CBS, approximately 3% of people in Wisconsin suffer from an eating disorder – 60,000 men and 132,000 women. Across the country, eating disorders affect around 30 million people.