5 days ago
TikTok Banned the "SkinnyTok" Hashtag. It's Only a Matter of Time Until a New Insidious Diet Trend Replaces It
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In this op-ed, Features Director Brittney McNamara considers TikTok's SkinnyTok hashtag ban and the seemingly unbeatable monster of diet culture.
If you've been on social media lately, you undoubtedly know about #SkinnyTok. Along with the rise in popularity of weight loss drugs like Zepbound and Wegovy over the last few years, thinness as an ideal has also returned to our cultural lexicon, spawning a whole hashtag full of creators discussing how they get and stay thin, swapping diet and workout tips that encourage sometimes extreme measures to be skinny.
But on June 3, TikTok banned #SkinnyTok as a search term after concern from European legislators about how the app can negatively impact young people's body image, according to the New York Times. The hashtag had 'become linked to unhealthy weight loss content,' TikTok said in its reasoning for the ban, something the European Commission was investigating because of the potential 'public health risk' associated with promoting 'extreme thinness' to young people online, Politico reports. Now, when users enter that search term, they'll be directed to resources like the National Alliance for Eating Disorders.
We know that social media can negatively affect our mental health, and can contribute to body image issues like body dysmorphia and even eating disorders, so this move is an all-around win. There is no benefit — even if society would like to tell you there is — to promoting extreme thinness or unhealthy diets, things that #SkinnyTok was often associated with. But even though the ban is a net positive in this sense, it's simply a bandaid on a much larger issue. Until we reckon with our cultural obsession with thinness and our wholesale buy-in to diet culture, #SkinnyTok will simply shift and transform, taking on a new slender shape online.
According to Today, #SkinnyTok began appearing on TikTok around the start of this year, gaining steam in March and April. Videos under the hashtag encouraged viewers to eat less, making hunger seem like a virtue and repackaging harmful diet advice as 'tough love." If you weren't dieting and participating in behaviors to make yourself smaller, many #SkinnyTok posts were there to shame you into submission.
It's not clear exactly who started the hashtag, but it is apparent how it gained popularity. Social media and other online forums have long been hotbeds for extreme diet talk and for promoting unhealthy body ideals. In the heyday of Tumblr, 'pro ana' (pro anorexia) and 'thinspo' content abounded. When those topics were banned, users found ways to evade that, substituting letters or words to signal their content to other users without triggering filters that would censor their posts. Meta whistle-blower Frances Haugen revealed internal research that found that 'when [32% of teen girls] felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.' As a result of that information, social media executives testified before Congress in 2021, in part about the ways their platforms impact young people's body image.
Just before #SkinnyTok officially earned its title, content creator Liv Schmidt was ousted from TikTok in October 2024 because of her posts instructing viewers on how to be skinny. Her posts violated TikTok's Community Guidelines, which prohibit 'promoting disordered eating and dangerous weight loss behaviors.' But before her ban, Schmidt had more than 670,000 followers on TikTok, according to the New York Times. She claimed her instructions on how to eat less with the explicit goal of being thin were simply the pursuit of a certain aesthetic, not a roadmap to potentially disordered eating. Even more recently, Schmidt's group chat called the Skinni Societe was demonetized by Meta after The Cut published an inside look at Schmidt's advice to followers, including lines like "eat like your next weigh-in is tomorrow.'
The resurgence of explicit diet talk and 'thinspo' on social media is evidence of a trend we've seen growing for a while now. The advent of GLP-1 drugs has made weight loss attainable for many, and has made getting even thinner an option for many already-thin people. And, with another Trump administration in office, a focus on thinness in society is no surprise. Research has shown a link between conservative ideology and anti-fatness, something we've seen mirrored in Trump's own language. So it's not necessarily a shock that people with fatphobic ideas would feel emboldened in this time, especially.
TikTok's #SkinnyTok ban is certainly the right move, and it's encouraging to know that people searching for it on that platform will instead be served resources to cope with disordered eating. But as we can see from the long history of disordered eating and 'skinny' content online, this move is likely to remove one threat, only for another to pop up in its wake.
Diet culture is much like the mythological hydra; when you cut one head off of this beast, two more grow in its place. The threats get more numerous, more insidious, the more we strike at it. To truly beat #SkinnyTok and trends like it, we'd need a cultural reckoning — one where we collectively decide that thinness isn't a value, but simply one of many states of being. We'd need to grapple with the racism and anti-Blackness baked into anti-fatness, and how promoting thinness has ties to white supremacy. We'd need to address anti-fat bias in medicine, and rethink the common tropes about fatness and health. We'd need to radically change our thinking, our social structures, our collective stereotypes. We'd need to then cauterize the wounds diet culture has left, making sure no new ugly heads could rear when we turn our backs.
Judging by the current political and social climate, that seems unlikely. It's certainly possible, and maybe one day we'll get there. In the meantime, #SkinnyTok may be dead, but it's only a matter of time before another hashtag or trend telling young people to aspire to thinness crops up, another head of this seemingly unkillable hydra ready to bite us in our ever-smaller butts.
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
