TikTok Has Barely Done Anything to Get Rid of Its Growing Pro-Anorexia Content

As TikTok continues to suck us into its endless reels of content for hours at a time, the app is seemingly becoming a more and more dangerous place to be: Everything seems to be a code word for something else and harmful, anti-choice rhetoric continues to flood “For You” pages. Now, the Chinese-created app is under fire for failing to put a stop to content that may induce, trigger, or worsen eating disorders in its young users—despite receiving ample and urgent warnings from researchers at the Center For Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). According to The Daily Beast, when the CCDH recently reviewed eating disorder-related content, it found that TikTok has only removed seven of 56 existing hashtags—35 of which were flagged as “pro-ana” (or pro-anorexia).

In November, the CCDH conducted an experiment to see exactly how a young person might come across this kind of content. Researchers created two TikTok accounts posing as 13-year-old girls, and within eight minutes of being on the app, their “For You” pages were filled with videos containing “self-harm, body image, mental health and suicide,” curated based on the demographic information that was inputted.

“Every view represents a potential victim—someone whose mental health might be harmed by negative body image content, someone who might start restricting their diet to dangerously low levels,” CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed wrote in a statement. “The stakes are too high for TikTok to continue to do nothing, or for our politicians to sit back and fail to act.”

This week marks Eating Disorders Awareness Week, but TikTok has seemingly done little on its part to amplify the week’s mission: While it has taken down the hashtag “thinspo,” more creative hashtags have evaded censorship. Admittedly, #edwithoutthesheeran and hashtags referring to “K-pop diets” could easily be mistaken as content relating to different fanbases, but with the CCDH’s warnings, TikTok has few excuses for not taking the content down. The longer they leave the content up, the more impact it has: As per The Daily Beast, eating disorder-related content has amassed an additional 1.6 billion views since CCDH first alerted TikTok, with 91 percent of views for content with these coded hashtags coming from users 24 years and younger.

CCDH’s researchers also assert that engagement with this kind of content online bleeds into real life, and can easily slip out of young people’s control: “Harmful content gives young users a road map to engage in unhealthy and risky dietary behaviors, which couches them in ‘fads’ or ‘trends’ when really they can serve as a gateway to an eating disorder, suicidal behaviors and in the worst case death,” Allison Ivie, Government Relations Representative at the Eating Disorders Coalition for Research, Policy, & Action told The Daily Beast. “It is clear from CCDH’s research and TikTok’s response, industry self-regulation is not enough.”

TikTok is already seeing the real-life ramifications of their inaction: The company is currently tied up in two personal injury lawsuits—both of which are on behalf of 14-year-old girls, whose lives and health have been significantly altered by encountering eating disorder-related content on the app. Moving forward, the center’s demands include that TikTok alters “its moderation policies, work with experts and advocacy organizations to remove harmful content, and provide resources to vulnerable users,” according to The Daily Beast.

As extremely harmful pro-diet discourse dominates our online spaces, my only hope is that TikTok can get serious about minimizing the harm of a society that continues to glorify thinness (often equating it to health) in order to uphold impossible beauty standards. Seriously, whatever happened to just showing me those dance routines I could never nail down?