When Silicon Valley product designer Chris Messina became the 19th person to join Instagram in 2010 he was hoping to change the world.
A friend of founders Kevin Systrom, 38, and Mike Krieger, 35, Messina, who invented the #hashtag to create global conversations, was inspired by company mantras such as 'Simplicity Matters', 'Inspire Creativity', and 'Community First'.
Now fast forward 12 years, and Instagram, which has a revenue of $86 billion and more than a billion users globally, has become one of the most influential – and toxic - social media companies in the world.
It was branded 'the worst social media platform for mental health and bullying' in 2017 by Britain's Royal Society for Public Health and its algorithms were blamed for the suicide of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who took her own life that year after looking at graphic self-harm images on Instagram.
'We were certainly plenty naïve,' said Messina. 'We had ideas about the world and about how technology could improve the world.
'The people that were building a lot of the social technologies were, I don't want to say similar to me, but they were probably more similar to me than different.
'What I mean by that is that we were, one, interested in technology, two, we were pretty literate and educated, and we thought that by bringing this technology to the world, a lot of things would just sort of sort themselves out.
'I'm sure that there was some vague awareness perhaps about that risk in the early days of social...
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