Facebook may have shelved its plans for an ‘Instagram for Kids’, but the photo-sharing app will continue to prompt complaints that it causes anxiety, depression and body image issues in teenage girls

Sorry kids, no carefully curated data-extraction experience for you quite yet. On Monday, Facebook announced that it is “pausing” controversial plans to create Instagram for Kids, a version of its photo-sharing app designed for children under the age of 13.

Does this mean Facebook has realised that it might not be in children’s best interest to hook them into social media at a tender young age? Has the company decided to put people above profit? Don’t be silly! The reason the tech giant has paused the project is because we idiots in the media misunderstood it, apparently. In an almost comically condescending blog post and series of tweets, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri explained that the company stood by the need to create a social media “experience” for children. Alas, he said, news about the project leaked before it had figured out all the details. “People feared the worst, and we had few answers at that stage. It’s clear we need to take more time on this.”

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

‘I took this near where people work out for my guerilla-style Wait Watchers series. When it went viral, I started getting hateful messages about my body’

It all started when I took a self-portrait in Times Square, New York. After I got the film developed, I noticed this man in the background appeared to be smirking at me. I thought: “What happens if you turn your camera around?” And it became a social experiment for the next five years.

I would find a heavily populated area, position myself to do something “mundane” to fit in, something similar to what other people were doing there, and then I’d take a burst of self-portraits, showing me but also the wider scene. So here I’m stretching because I’m at Venice Beach in Los Angeles, and about 10 feet to the left is Muscle Beach, with people working out.

The suffering of the photo-sharing app’s users came into focus this week with the leak of Facebook’s internal research

• ‘I felt my body wasn’t good enough’

Emily started using Instagram when she was in her mid-teens and found it helpful at first. She used the photo-sharing app to follow fitness influencers, but what began as a constructive relationship with the platform spiralled into a crisis centred on body image. At 19 she was diagnosed with an eating disorder.

“I felt like my body wasn’t good enough, because even though I did go to the gym a lot, my body still never looked like the bodies of these influencers,” says Emily, now a 20-year-old a student who is in recovery.

As the high school comedy returns for a third series, its Bafta-winning star talks about stage fright, embarrassing scenes, and the torment that lay behind her desire to please people

In June, Aimee Lou Wood, 26, won a Bafta for best female performance in a comedy programme for her role as another Aimee (a teenager) in the hit Netflix show Sex Education, about a set of sexually active high school students, now returning for a third series. Even before the Bafta, Wood was always being stopped in the street. Fans wanted to talk to her, about Sex Education, about everything, because they related to her so strongly. Wood is naturally so friendly, she’d engage in conversation and make herself late. Then she starred opposite Bill Nighy in the forthcoming Oliver Hermanus film, Living: “Obviously, every single person recognises Bill Nighy, and he handles it with such grace,” Wood says, when we meet to talk in a north London photo studio. “With people in the street, I was like [she mock hyperventilates]: ‘Did I say the right thing? Was I nice enough?’ Now I’m learning to be: ‘Thank you so much!’ and carry on walking.”

It’s easy to see why fans relate to Wood: never mind the dazzling prettiness, she’s sparky, warm and expressive. She comes from a working-class family in Stockport, Greater Manchester, and although, following her parents’ divorce, her mother’s new partner paid for her to attend a private secondary school, she kept her rich Mancunian tones: “I sound like my mum and I like that. I like that I sound like where I’m from.”

Children’s Society says ‘distressing’ findings are warning sign of future issues for teenagers

Growing numbers of British children are unhappy with their lives, with many worrying about school, friends and how they look, a report reveals.

The number of 10- to 15-year-olds who say they are not happy rose from 173,000 (3.8%) in 2009-10 to an estimated 306,000 (6.7%) in 2018-19), the Children’s Society found. That 6.7% – one in every 15 young people – is the highest proportion in the last decade, it said.