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OK, so you've probably been here before.
So you take a photo that
you maybe want to post on social media
and throw a cute filter on it.
But then you notice this small detail that you want to change.
No problem. You can edit it.
Then you see something else you want to change,
so you edit that.
And then edit something else, and then another and another.
And then suddenly you don't even look like yourself anymore.
A 2020 study done by
did a survey with girls ages ten to 17
to see how they use filters and editing apps,
and here's what they found.
80 per cent of girls said that by the age of 13,
they had used filters or downloaded editing apps
to change the way they looked.
And 37 per cent of them said they don't feel like
they look good enough without the filter.
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So I interviewed Dr. Jennifer Mills,
who is a professor at York University.
A lot of her work is focused on body image,
how social media can affect it,
and also how we feel about ourselves.
She told me there are two main problems
with using filters or editing your photos.
So the first problem is that spending too much time
thinking about the things you don't like about yourself
is bad for your self-esteem.
[voice of Dr. Mills]
The second issue Dr. Mills talked about
was edited photos on social media
that give us unrealistic standards of beauty.
[voice of Dr. Mills]
So that's what science says. But is this the experience
that real people are having with filters?
I wanted to investigate more.
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You can tell me about the moment you first decided
that filters were problematic.
It kind of blurs into like a whole big spectrum of things.
I made a vow to myself I was going to stop dieting,
that I was going to stop talking to myself in a negative way,
and then it was just like a natural progression
that actually, the way I viewed myself with these filters on
was something I was becoming like dependent on.
Gradually and gradually I kept noticing that my
sort of value of myself was
based on what I was seeing through a filter,
and I just took it,
took that control back and I was like, if I remove them,
then I will have to re-learn how I look without them.
And that's exactly what happened.
How did you feel going through that?
It's one of those things where you
you kind of don't realize how bad it is
until you're kind of so far down.
And that's one of the things with the whole of the campaign
I've tried to really kind of reiterate to other people
is that this isn't coming from a place of shame or judgement
if you use filters, because I fully understand
why people use them. They are designed to make us look
as close to the beauty standards as possible.
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The initial movement of the campaign was
if you feel brave enough to
upload a photo of yourself without a filter,
and even that, for some people, was like
the bravest thing they'd ever done.
And, you know, I had one woman say that she found it scarier
than giving birth because she just could not even
see herself without having a filter on her face.
And it had become such a deep rooted issue in her
self-confidence journey that she
couldn't believe how much it took out of her
to take this filter off for a photo.
Dr. Mills also pointed out that edited photos are worse for our
self-esteem when it's real people that we know.
[voice of Dr. Mills]
So hear me out.
I'm about to go into something a little controversial.
What would happen if we stopped filtering
and editing our photos?
Would we start to see a change
about how we feel about ourselves
or things going on in the world?
It was like a liberating feeling.
The more and more I did it, the better I felt.
And now, when I put a filter over my face,
I actually had to do something for a brand,
that was the first time in a long time where I put this
filter over my face and it really affected me because
I looked amazing with the filter on.
All in all, it's been a really liberating feeling,
but it's a very long process, and
I understand that it's not an overnight thing for anyone.
So what do you think?
Has photo editing and filtering
changed the way you think about yourself?
Can you drop the filter?
Let me know at cbckidsnews@cbc.ca.
For
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