Turning to TikTok: The Evolution of Thinspiration

Hello this is turning to TikTok the evolution of thinspiration and researchers are Sara Buchanan, Emily Hart, Dalande Leger, Kierre Paramore, and Kayliegh Ratashack, and our supervisor is Tes Tuason, PHD. We will be discussing our project on thinspiration. So, thinspiration is a type of social media content, and it promotes and motivates individuals who seek an idealized thin body type. It’s been found to increase body dissatisfaction and promote disordered eating. Hashtags that are on social media explicitly label content as thinspiration and they have been banned from most social media sites. However, content that fits the same criteria is still widely accessible. So this qualitative study has analyzed the presence of more covert yet still influential thinspiration on TikTok. So our research topic is evaluating new content on TikTok that meets established criteria for thinspo without being labeled as such. And previous research has shown correlations between exposure to thinspiration and fitspiration related images on social media, and increases in body size satisfaction, demonstrating reason to further understand these types of posts on social media. Other studies would include content referred to as “Pro eating disorder” on websites with specific hashtags to social media sites, and they have the common themes which include thin bodies, using guilt as a motivator of pursuing perfection, and control. There are similarities between images labeled as the thinspiration compared to fitspiration and how they glorify specific body ideal, though the ideals do vary. Some are thin versus a more muscular body type. And a recent study examined the eating disorder recovery hashtag on a newer, more popular social media app Tik Tok, finding some content to still mirror more “pro eating disorder” content. So no research has related content analysis of hashtags not directly labeled as eating disorder related or through thinspiration. But some experts and populations have spoken out about trends that mirror this content. So the specific research that we will research questions we’ll be trying to look out for is: How has pro eating disorder content on social media, how has it evolved? Is pro eating disorder content still accessible on mainstream social media sites? And our hypothesis is pro ed content is still accessible on social media, however, it has evolved to become more covert and hidden under a seemingly more positive messages.

So for our methods section, our research team defined the criteria of thinspiration using the existing research that we mentioned previously. So we looked at these certain variables and utilized those to define what that thinspiration was looking like on TikTok. So those variables were body checking, which by definition is showing your body or a particular body part with the intention of analyzing it. A thin body which is a person who is objectively thin or straight sized by societal standards and measurements, visible bones, so being emaciated or showing protruding bones, pursuing perfection, which was motivation or talk pertaining to obtain a certain look or lifestyle, negative self talk, which was writing or language that’s degrading oneself, low calorie diet, which was showing low calorie meals or foods, including daily calorie counts or advice-giving for particularly low calorie recipes, sexualized body, so wearing little or revealing clothing posing in a very obviously suggestive way, with intentional angles, before and after photos. So showing or describing one’s body in the past versus the present, which normally was indicating weight loss, and exercise for a certain body type. So providing advice or showing exercises in order to lose weight, or create a certain particular body shape or size. One thing we also decided to look at was the top comments in the comment section of each video. And we defined whether overall the comments were endorsing the message that was in the video not endorsing the message they denied or disagreed with the creator, or it was neutral or mixed. So a mix of both endorsing and not endorsing comments, or the comments were just irrelevant to the video. So for our methods, we began defining the common hashtags to use for research by analyzing the existing literature to see what phrases have been used on other platforms. The difference with Tiktok is, it’s a fairly new form of social media and has a unique algorithm so many of the blatant tags that would signal an eating disorder are flagged. It also uses particular sounds or trends that place all videos under the same audio or same sound together. So this allowed us to find popular and viral Tiktok trends and the sounds or hashtags associated with them. We discovered that the tags #dream body, #that girl, #what I eat in a day, #wide ribcage, and #ED provided us with relevant and viral content that pertained to our study. Several of the tags actually did not seem to have a negative connotation pertaining to Ed. However, we believe this phenomenon actually just provided some evidence for our hypothesis. That thinspo content is more discreet and covert on today’s social media apps. Using those selected hashtags, and the synchronizing sounds, or audios that went with them, we saved the top liked videos under each of the hashtags to create a randomized sample. However, TikTok because it utilizes both tagged sounds and voice dubs, and then as well as the hashtags with the caption. This allowed us to access a lot more content even without the specific hashtags being used in the caption section of the video. So we collected a sample size of 91 videos, and then we created our specific criteria based on what was mentioned previously, and in order for it to qualify as thinspo the post had to meet at least three of the criteria in order to qualify. And then the categories were evidence of body checking, the portrayal of a thin body, portrayal of bones or emaciation, language or images promoting the strive for perfection, providing advice or recommendations for a particular exercise for a body shape, and negative self talk. And then, as mentioned, we had also gone through the liked comments as well, and determined whether they were endorsed or not. So after establishing these categories, we analyzed each video individually, and marked what criteria each video met. And we found that 72 of the videos or 79.1% of our sample actually met the criteria of three or more ED related categories for thinspiration. Along with the percentage of videos that fit the criteria, 59% of the videos had comments that generally endorsed the creators messages, whereas only 21% of the videos had comments that did not endorse the creators message. The other percent was just ones that were neutral or mixed of both. And as you can see, the bar graph in the middle demonstrates the frequency of each criteria within the videos with some of the more frequent ones body checking, thin body and negative self talk. Our findings do support the other research that thinspiration content is hidden and within hashtags instead of being expressly expressed overtly. And that oftentimes, people still strive for a specific thin glorified body type through social media. The results demonstrated that even though certain video content is not explicitly labeled as thinspiration on TikTok, based on our established criteria the majority of our sample did qualify as thinspiration. The most, as is already mentioned, the most common criteria that the videos fit were body checking, thin body and negative self talk, which are very common in the thinspiration that work is established in the past. In general, people interacting with these videos also seemed to endorse the messages the creators gave, even if these messages were negative or unhealthy. Oftentimes, we would also see that if it was a pursuing perfection message, people would also compare themselves to the creator and feel negatively about themselves. Overall, this content in the past has been shown to impact people negatively leading to body dissatisfaction and disordered eating. And even though most social media sites have created ways to restrict some of this more overtly negative content, they have begun to struggle having a balance, allowing creators to share their own content while also limiting content that is obviously harmful to viewers and can negatively impact their mental health.