Forget Facebook -- Instagram is the great self-esteem deflater

It's a truism that Facebook is the many-headed frenemy, the great underminer.

Plenty of research has shown that "passive consumption" of your friends' feeds and your own broadcasts on Facebook can correlate with feelings of loneliness, envy and resentment in many users, with vacation photos standing out as a prime trigger.

Such studies are careful to point out that it's not Facebook per se that inspires states of disconnection — rather, it's specific uses of Facebook. If you primarily use Facebook to share interesting news articles, exchange messages with new acquaintances and play Candy Crush Saga, chances are you're doing OK. But if the hours you spend on Facebook are largely about creeping through other people's posts — especially their vacation snaps — then science confirms that you have entered into a semi-consensual, almost sadomasochistic relationship with Facebook and need to break the cycle.

A closer look at Facebook studies also supports an untested but tantalizing hypothesis: Despite all the evidence, Facebook is actually not the greatest underminer at the social-media cocktail party. Facebook is not the frenemy with the most heads.

That title, in fact, goes to Insta­gram.

Instagram distills the most crazy-making aspects of the Facebook experience.

So far, academic studies of Instagram's effects on our emotional states are scarce. But it's tempting to extrapolate those effects from the Facebook studies, because out of the many activities Facebook offers, the three things that correlate most strongly with a self-loathing screen hangover are basically the three things that Instagram is currently for: loitering around others' photos, perfunctory like-ing and "broadcasting" to a relatively amorphous group.

Instagram is exclusively image-driven, and images will crack your mirror.

"You get more explicit and implicit cues of people being happy, rich and successful from a photo than from a status update," saidsaid Hanna Krasnova of Humboldt University Berlin, co-author of the study on Facebook and envy. "A photo can very powerfully provoke immediate social comparison, and that can trigger feelings of inferiority. You don't envy a news story."

Krasnova's research has led her to define what she calls an "envy spiral" peculiar to social media.

"If you see beautiful photos of your friend on Instagram," she said, "one way to compensate is to self-present with even better photos, and then your friend sees your photos and posts even better photos, and so on. Self-promotion triggers more self-promotion, and the world on social media gets further and further from reality."

Granted, an envy spiral can unspool just as easily on Facebook or Twitter. But for a truly gladiatorial battle of the selfies, Instagram is the only rightful Colosseum.

"You spend so much time creating flattering, idealized images of yourself, sorting through hundreds of images for that one perfect picture, but you don't necessarily grasp that everybody else is spending a lot of time doing the same thing." Toma said.

Then, after spending lots of time carefully curating and filtering your images, you spend even more time staring at other people's carefully curated and filtered images that you assume they didn't spend much time on. And the more you do that, Toma said, "the more distorted your perception is that their lives are happier and more meaningful than yours."

This happens all the time on Facebook, but because Instagram is image-based, it creates a purer reality-distortion field. Instagram boosts your chances of violating "the gray line of stalkerism."

"If you don't know someone, and Facebook is telling you that you have interests in common," said Nicole Ellison of the University of Michigan School of Information, "you can see their profile as a list of icebreakers."

But that same profile is also a potential list of icemakers. If you meet a vague acquaintance at a party and strike up a conversation about a science article he posted to his Facebook wall, that probably seems normal. If you meet a vague acquaintance at a party and strike up a conversation about the eco-lodge he chose for his honeymoon in the Maldives, he will likely back away from you slowly. "And then," Ellison says, "you've violated the gray line of stalkerism."

And arguably, you've violated the gray line of stalkerism simply by looking at those photos in the first place, even if you don't reveal yourself in public as the sad lurker that you are. Each time you swipe through more images of people's meals and renovation projects and holiday sunsets, you are potentially blurring the boundary between stranger-you-haven't-met and sleazy voyeur skulking around the cabana with an iPhone.