The "Fox & Friends" program on Fox News Channel raised the issue about this in a segment last week.
"Some apps can compare users to celebrities while others show what they would look like with smoother skin, with narrower chins, with longer eyelashes and even smaller noses in order to look “prettier,” host Ainsley Earhardt said.
Clinical psychologist Dr. Katherine Kuhlman called it incredibly sad.
"Unrealistic standards have been around for a very long time, but the exposure and the intensity of that exposure have increased," said Kuhlman.
AFN sought comment Maggie McKneely, legislative strategist for Concerned Women for America. She called this "tragic" and a new way to exacerbate an age-old problem.
"Women in particular have this tendency to try and find some of our self-worth in how beautiful we are or how close we come to meeting some kind of standard," McKneely told AFN. "It totally discounts everything else about them, their skills, their personality, their talents, all the hard work they've put into their education or anything else to develop themselves as a human being, so, we just think this is a very sad thing for young girls today."
When asked what should be done about this, McKneely said that parents should better police what their kids are downloading.
"We also need legislation that's going to help put safeguards on app stores and apps to protect kids from getting into content that's harmful," said McKneely. "The age rating that you see on an app store is actually set by the developers rather than some sort of objective third party, so when you go into the app store, things like TikTok are actually rated for kids ages 4 and over, whereas as we know there is content on TikTok that is wildly inappropriate for 4-year-olds. It's wildly inappropriate for even 12- or 13-year-olds."
