Hidden “Treat” Button is Found on Instagram
By Kaylee Buzzell
Although most teenagers love social media and its features, there are bad sides to every good thing. Many students at Springfield Renaissance have been devoting all their time to a new Instagram “treat” button, according to many parents and some students themselves.
Ninth grader Eloise Annaline described the day she found a button on Instagram that gave her random challenge and then provided her a “treat” every time she completed the challenge.
“I wasn’t looking for it,” Eloise said. “I just saw a flashing green and blue light and instinctively clicked on it. Afterwards, time stopped for me.”
Time seemed to stop for many students on Thursday January 12, 2021, when the new button was first released, according to Eloise’s friend Claire Perpis, who does not have social media herself. “Eloise wasn’t acting normally after that day,” she said. “Five days after, I asked her what time it was, because we had to get to our next class. She gave the full date and time in a robotic voice,and it was still January 12th.”
Skinner Box Diagram by Steve Lillie. From
alamy.com
A Springfield mother complains that a challenge had her daughter spend 10 hours in the cold. “I kept trying to get her to come inside, but she kept saying ‘I must get a treat’, the same thing over and over,” said Lila Carson, parent of 11th grader Jennifer. “It was scary, the button changed my daughter. I want her back.”
“I do love getting treats,” agreed Jennifer Carson. “The challenges are so easy, I just press the button, complete the challenge and get a cookie. Though every time I eat it, I feel... Different, as if I am a different person.”
Social media addiction is an increasing problem for teens. An article published by the Wall Street Journal explained how the lost time is changing teenagers' personalities: “Among teenagers who reported suicidal thoughts, 13 percent of British users and 6 percent of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram,” the Journal reported.
“It is like all the human parts left in us has been given to these social media platforms. Teenagers especially, their addiction to their phones is not helping this problem,” according to social media research scientist James Rivera. “They are acting like dogs.”
Instagram’s To Blame
While Instagram claims to have introduced the “Treat” button for experimental purposes and never meant it to be public, evidence disputes this. Eric Peterson, an Instagram user testing expert turned whistleblower whose own daughter was taken in by the innovation, was able to access a development archive that clearly put the button forward as a positive business feature for Facebook, parent company of Instagram. “We must do something to stop Instagram,” he testified at Congress. “They are hacking our children.”
For its part, Instagram appears it will cooperate with the pressure to remove the treat button. “We have direct messaged public relations officer Sung Yeh,” says officer Carl Pena, “with a ‘Yeh, hey, take the button down!' ‘Give me some time,” he replied.’ (So far it remains up.)
Psychology Agrees
Psychologists quoted in the New York Times are increasingly worried about teens' mental health due to “The Smartphone Trap”. In 2019, rates of depression doubled among teens, but research revealed that rates had been rising since the mid 2010s, when majority of American teens had phones.
“People are walking and driving while using their phones, they are so addicted,” said school crossing guard Alex Johnson. “When I was their age, I was outside, in the real world.”
But the “Treat” button is making thing much worse, people say. “It’s like they’re rats in Instagram’s experiment, just pressing that button over and over," says Lilee Patterson, a psychology major at Western New England University. “We had better free them from this cage before it’s too late.”