Influence of Instagram in body image advertising of young men’s self-esteem and perception of their bodies

• Main Author: Di Dia, Francesco Giacomo
• Publication Date: 2022
• Format: Master thesis
• Language: eng
• Source: Repositórios Científicos de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP)
• Download full: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/40079
• topic: Self-esteem; Instagram; Masculinity; Genders; Body image; Auto-estima; Masculinidade; Género; Imagem corporal

Academic research has showed that social media have considerably shaped the perception of our own physical and intimate characteristics. Over the last years, communication agencies and celebrities have taken up the role of “influencers”, trying to dictate the patterns of beauty standards and acceptable body features to the online society. Together with the rise of advertising’s influential power, especially on Instagram, new social scenarios emerged. These, in turn, have contributed to the development of new masculinity traits. Agencies and content creators on such platforms, therefore, should be aware of the effects they could have on their young public, whose self-evaluation is still malleable. Although most of the actual research is conducted on young women, research on boys of the same age seems to derive interesting results. This research addresses the degree of influence of Instagram body image type of content on young men’s levels of self-esteem in Italy, but it also proposes to be an analysis of how advertisers and agencies make use of gender differences to come up with different content on the platform. The study employs different methods of research: quantitative surveys to male participants (N= 204, Italian adolescents between 16 and 23 years old) and questions to Instagram content producers primarily using the body as their communication mean to understand their role in the formation of certain behaviors. In this dissertation it was concluded that Italian adolescent men’s exposure to body image content does not contribute to major changes in their self-esteem, contrary to the female counterpart. However, when approaching themes such as visual adjustments on Instagram, both content creators and the users of the platform validate the hypothesis of a perceivable correlation between the alteration of body features on the platform and a diminishing selfconfidence.