Latest news with #SkinnyTok
RTÉ News
2 days ago
- Health
- RTÉ News
Commissioner McGrath raises 'SkinnyTok' concerns with TikTok CEO
Michael McGrath, EU Commissioner for Democracy, Justice, the Rule of Law and Consumer Protection, has held an online meeting with TikTok CEO Shou Chew. In a statement, Mr McGrath described it as a constructive meeting during which a number of items were discussed including data protection and data flows, consumer protection, the Commission's plans for a Digital Fairness Act, the protection of minors online, and plans for a European Democracy Shield. The Commissioner also raised the trend known as 'SkinnyTok', the social media hashtag which promotes often dangerous advice on weight-loss and dieting. "I raised with Mr Chew the dangers posed to minors in particular by the social media hashtag SkinnyTok," Mr McGrath said. "I reaffirmed that the protection of minors online is a top priority of the European Commission and there are clear obligations on all social media platforms to ensure children are safe online." The risks associated with TikTok's algorithms are already part of the investigation opened by the European Commission against TikTok in February 2024. This investigation is specifically addressing TikTok's mitigation measures in relation to harmful algorithmic recommendation, including in relation to eating disorders. "For his part, Mr Chew said TikTok is taking the matter very seriously and is engaging with Commission officials in the context of the application of the Digital Services Act to ensure the required mitigation is in place," Mr McGrath said. "This is a live investigation which will take its course in the normal way but I felt it was important to reiterate the Commission's strong stance on child protection," he added. In a statement to RTÉ's Morning Ireland, TikTok said it has "strict rules" against dangerous weight loss behaviours on its platform, and the app offers several wellbeing resources, ways to connect with experts. It added that for teenage viewers, some content with harmful body ideals is age restricted.
RTÉ News
2 days ago
- Health
- RTÉ News
Young people want TikTok held accountable for harmful 'SkinnyTok' trend
The European Commission and Coimisiún na Meán have said they are aware of the issues linked to the trend known as 'SkinnyTok', the social media hashtag which promotes often dangerous advice to make people as thin as possible. European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said the protection of minors online was a "top priority". "Risks linked to TikTok's algorithms are part of the investigation opened against TikTok in February 2024. "Specifically, we are investigating TikTok's mitigation measures in relation to harmful algorithmic recommendation, including in relation to eating disorders," he said. Head of Advocacy and Young Engagement at UNICEF Ireland Aibhlín O'Leary said that she frequently hears about SkinnyTok from teenagers, as part of the workshops she conducts in schools. "Digital harm and online spaces come up a lot in our conversations," she said. "It's primarily girls that talk about the impact of this trend, particularly on their self-esteem and the pressure to achieve this perfect, very skinny body, and the messages that they're receiving from influencers and content producers on platforms like TikTok." As part of the UNICEF workshops, teens are asked what they would like to see change in relation to the issues that impact them. In relation to SkinnyTok, Ms O'Leary said: "The greatest demands from young people are to do with companies like TikTok and Meta that are facilitating these platforms. "We hear a lot of young people saying, these organisations like TikTok should be more accountable, that they should remove this content, they should put up warnings to let people know that this might be harmful, or it might even be related to an eating disorder". In a statement to RTÉ's Morning Ireland, TikTok said it has "strict rules" against dangerous weight loss behaviours on its platform, and the app offers several wellbeing resources, ways to connect with experts. It added that for teenage viewers, some content with harmful body ideals is age restricted. Ms O'Leary said that the teenagers were able to distinguish between videos that promoted a healthy lifestyle and what they called 'SkinnyTok'. "SkinnyTok is where it moves into suggestions like 'Summer is coming, so I better not eat'. That's where the toxic element of it really comes in." TikTok account holder Valerie Spicer, who is based in the US, posts SkinnyTok content under the username housebunnygymrat. "I share my journey and lessons learned through weight loss, binge eating, recovery and strengthening my self-concept," Ms Spicer said. In many of Ms Spicer's videos she precedes her advice with the word "credentials" and points to a photograph of her past self in a larger body. Ms Spicer explained that the reason she does that is to be "honest and accountable" with herself. She added that she uses words such as a 'fat' and 'skinny' as a way of "taking control back from some of those words that can be a little bit polarising". Speaking from her home in Dallas, Texas, about the kind of videos she posts to TikTok, Ms Spicer said she receives far more positive feedback than negative. "While I've used the SkinnyTok hashtag and that verbiage because it's a popular topic, I'm still aware that topics like that do require nuance. "So, I do try to balance sharing a subjective experience with an objective perspective. "I'm not here to hurt anyone's feelings. I definitely do take that feedback into consideration. "I figure out how I could reword something if it's truly, you know, causing more harm than good," she said. As well as mental health, physical health can also be influenced by content on SkinnyTok. "Every person who comes to see me will admit that they have at some stage seen something online and they're not too sure if what they've seen is true or not," said dietitian Michaela Carrick. Ms Carrick also makes TikTok videos under the username michaelanutrition responding to the incorrect health information seen under 'SkinnyTok' and similar hashtags. "You can tell from a lot of their content [on #skinnytok] that [the TikTokers] are talking from personal experience, so it's not based on scientific research or any evidence. "It's just 'This worked for me and look at all these amazing results that I've gotten, you should do the same thing if you want to be like me'." Ms Carrick said that no healthcare professional would give advice to a patient or client based on their personal experience. She added that content that gives personal advice for weight loss may be meant well, but could potentially cause harm if seen by a vulnerable person. "A lot of this advice that we see online is acting as if everyone needs to eat exactly the same way, but everyone's going to have completely different needs, Ms Carrick said. "And then you add the complexity of people being young, developing, being quite impressionable and potentially having more issues with their body image or their relationship with food, while everything is changing. "So definitely you shouldn't be using this advice that people are sharing". Ms O'Leary of UNICEF acknowledged that the potentially harmful messages seen on the SkinnyTok hashtag have been around for a long time, including on other social media platforms. "The content or the message isn't something that's particularly new, what may be different in TikTok is how powerful the algorithm appears to be. "Young people are saying once you watch one of these videos, you're just hooked into this spiral of them, and you just see and more and more of this content. "We definitely hear people saying that their mental health has suffered, that their self-esteem has gone down, that they're comparing themselves to other girls online to women online whose body looks nothing like theirs". Coimisiún na Meán is assisting the European Commission with its investigation into TikTok. In a statement, Coimisiún na Meán said that is recognises the potential harm for children caused by leading them down 'rabbit holes' through recommender systems used by platforms.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- General
- The Guardian
What happened to body positivity?
'There's lots of chat at the moment about #SkinnyTok,' Jenny Stevens, the Guardian's deputy features editor, tells Helen Pidd. 'The TikTok influencers, TikTok users, who are documenting their extreme weight-loss journeys. 'I've looked through that hashtag and I think, wow, some of these people are really, really unwell. And I think that there is a profit-seeking algorithm that is pushing that content into the feeds of young users.' Stevens explains why she is worried about the rise in weight-loss drugs, as someone who suffered from an eating disorder. 'I worry about them. And the wider media context, and their absolute fixation on who's taking them, who isn't, who's lost the weight, how they've lost the weight. Look at their bones jutting out … I worry about the effects of it on vulnerable people who are already suffering with disordered eating.' Also, we ask what a renewed fixation on thinness means for plus-size women? Gina Tonic, the author of Greedy Guts: Notes From an Insatiable Woman, talks about the origins of the body positivity movement and why it feels less visible than it did. 'I think Covid put health into the forefront of society's point of view as something that we really needed to prioritise for ourselves and also for our communities. And obviously, the first people to suffer under that kind of logic is people who are disabled, but also people who are seen as unhealthy, I guess, or willingly unhealthy. 'And fatness is automatically associated with being unhealthy and has been for decades. So it just feels like a natural follow-on with a public obsession with health, and the perception that thinness is health, thinness becomes the priority again for so many people,' says Tonic. You can listen to Jenny Stevens's Today in Focus episode on her own experiences, recorded in 2021, here. Gina Tonic's story on being trolled can be found here: A moment that changed me: I found out the identity of my troll – and it shook me Support the Guardian today:
Evening Standard
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Evening Standard
There's much to hate about SkinnyTok, but at least they're honest
TikTok needs to do better at cracking down on the dark side of SkinnyTok. They are right – teenagers should not be exposed to this kind of content, yet it is still happening. But the tough love approach is not necessarily bad in itself. As one 37-year-old SkinnyTok fan put it: 'I have never walked so many steps, I have never been so motivated… but damn, I would not let a young person see those videos.' As long as the fashion industry holds up thinness as a beauty standard, then a large portion of women will want to look that way. Why not be honest about it?
WIRED
21-05-2025
- Health
- WIRED
Eating Disorder Content Is Infiltrating TikTok. Some Creators Are Going Viral Debunking It
May 21, 2025 7:00 AM As 'SkinnyTok' posts advise people to suck up their hunger, some creators are using blunt humor to dissuade young people from pro-eating disorder messaging. Photo-illustration: Jacqui VanLiew; Getty Images Content warning: This piece includes descriptions of eating disorders and self-harm that may be triggering to some readers. Soon after E turned 16, she started seeing TikToks that urged her to lose weight. People in the 'SkinnyTok' community called them 'harsh motivation.' Some girls printed out photos of underweight models and taped them to their fridge doors. Others shared mantras to stop eating like: 'You don't need a treat, you're not a dog.' The phrase that stuck with E the most was 'Your stomach isn't growling, it's applauding.' For around two months, she said she restricted calories to a dangerously low amount, because 'that's what they told me to do.' 'It felt so comforting and motivating to see those videos,' says E, who doesn't want her name used due to privacy concerns. 'There are so many accounts like these, which made me think 'Oh yeah, this is normal'.' It's easy to find TikToks like the ones E described—but the platform is far from being an outlier. 'SkinnyTok' is a genre of videos about weight loss, ranging from 'harsh motivation' to food diaries showing what women eat to stay 'lean.' It has been compared to 'pro-anorexia' and 'pro-eating disorder' communities that have thrived for over a decade on platforms like Tumblr. More recently, on X, pro-eating disorder groups have attracted hundreds of thousands of members through algorithmic recommendation. The groups proliferated after Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022, and users say they have flourished due to lack of moderation. TikTok says it has cracked down on these types of posts, saying pro-eating disorder content is banned on its platform and that it has taken other steps to mitigate the issue. But experts tell WIRED that both social media and the widespread nature of GLP-1 weight loss drugs (which are often advertised on the platforms) can be triggering, not only to people who are in recovery from eating disorders, but to people who have never struggled with them before. Photo-illustration: Jacqui VanLiew; Getty Images Now, some creators are releasing videos that poke fun at the absurdity of eating disorder content in an effort to dissuade others from buying into it. But experts say it's a fine line between using humor to debunk and punching down. One of the first results when searching 'SkinnyTok' is a slideshow set to thumping electronic music and a young woman screaming 'Control yourself!' The pictures in the slideshow feature the faceless bodies and hands of thin, young white women, as well as bowls of sliced carrots and blood oranges. Superimposed over the images are some of the same weight loss mantras E recalls. It has more than a quarter of a million views. According to TikTok's tools for advertisers, videos with the 'SkinnyTok' hashtag have been viewed over 53 million times in the past week. The advice ranges from the benign, like loading up on protein at the beginning of the day, to promoting extreme calories deficits and other forms of disordered eating in pursuit of thinness. Some women show 'before' pictures and talk about how they lost dozens of pounds. A 2021 survey of 273 women who used TikTok found that 64 percent had been 'exposed to disordered eating content' on the 'For You' page of the platform. TikTok has since added a feature to show eating disorder recovery resources to users who search terms associated with them, including 'SkinnyTok.' The resources do not appear when searching for 'harsh motivation,' which directs users to 'harsh food motivation' and 'harsh body motivation.' The platform also said it adjusted its algorithm to interrupt repetitive patterns of videos about weight loss. In a statement to WIRED, TikTok says the 2021 survey 'has significant limitations, does not reflect the experience of our community, and was conducted three years ago. We continually enhance our platform and policies to promote a positive and safe experience, and regularly consult with experts, remove content that violate our policies, and provide access to supportive resources.' TikTok also removed one video WIRED flagged that promoted skipping meals and drinking water instead. But four practitioners tell WIRED patients in eating disorder recovery still bring up TikTok and 'SkinnyTok' trends. Dr. Lauren Breithaupt, a Harvard Medical School clinical psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist who specializes in eating disorders, says 'patients are reporting specific TikTok and Instagram trends that amplify their anxiety or trigger disordered behaviors.' 'Today's adolescents don't need to seek out pro-eating disorder content,' she adds. 'It finds them.' Eating disorders have the second-highest mortality rate of any mental health-related disorder. They have been on the rise worldwide for decades, doubling in the general population from 2000 to 2018. Then, between 2018 and 2022, health visits for eating disorders doubled in the US for kids and teenagers. In addition to the growing role of social media, weight loss drugs like Ozempic have become more accessible and popular. They have also been linked to eating disorders, with practitioners reporting that some patients are developing them after they begin taking GLP-1 drugs. Breithaupt said there's not one singular cause for an eating disorder, which involves biological, social, and psychological factors. 'But are there certain individuals where this overwhelming amount of content could lead to more disordered eating or down that path? Yes,' she says, adding that once someone engages with that content, the algorithms ensure that they see more. E's body image problems started when she was 12, but got worse because of social media. She says she first got on the internet to find ways to lose weight and found 15-minute workouts to do in the days leading up to wearing a swimsuit. 'They would promote very underweight girls and make it seem like they were the 'normal' body. When I realized I don't look like that, it made me feel bad,' E says. Registered dietician Michelle Pillepich says SkinnyTok videos are often presented as if they're promoting good health, but they're actually regressive. 'It's packaged in this message of 'This is just to feel good, just to help you feel confident,' but is selling and promoting weight stigma and bringing us back to the message of 'thin makes you happy and you have to be skinny to be healthy,'' she says. 'I thought we knew that thinness and health are not equal, but that's really the message being sent again.' During the Covid-19 pandemic, at the height of TikTok's popularity, Pillepich started posting her own TikTok videos. Some of them 'took off and got a lot of traction,' and she has almost 15,000 followers now. She sees the platform as an opportunity to share information about nutrition and eating disorders. In early April, Pillepich posted a video asking viewers to 'tell me the craziest most unhinged thing you did to motivate yourself to recover from an ED or disordered eating. I don't mean 'for my family.' I mean the wildest thoughts that helped you eat when you really didn't want to.' Nearly five million people watched and over 14,000 left comments. Some of the most-liked ones are, 'a nail tech told me that she was going to start charging me extra cause 'making gastric acid nails cute is hard,'' and, 'For a while I imagined the ED thoughts being said by Trump so I wouldn't wanna listen to them.' This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. 'I am finding it very hopeful,' Pillepich says. 'People do want to recover, they do want to feel better in their relationship with food.' Around the same time Pillepich posted her video, E came across a creator named Stephen Imeh who she says was 'unglamorizing' eating disorders with his blunt TikToks. One of Imeh's popular videos shows pictures of burgers, donuts, and other dishes as a retort to the idea that 'nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.' His content regularly gets hundreds of thousands to millions of views. Imeh, 19, a Houston-based college student, was initially drawn to a social media trend called 'looksmaxxing,' where men and boys strive to improve their facial appearance down to the shape of their nose, jawline, eyes, and hairline. 'Looksmaxxing' promotes tongue exercises, sucking in your cheeks, getting plastic surgery and disordered eating. After posting a 'looksmaxxing' video, Imeh, who is Black, says he received racist comments, including ones telling him to 'just be white.' Upon realizing that the community was 'toxic and racist,' Imeh pivoted to anti-looksmaxxing content and then stumbled on 'SkinnyTok' and pro-eating disorder communities on X. 'It's way easier to find SkinnyTok, eating disorder TikTok, than recovery,' Imeh said. 'I went for a different approach, telling them the side effects and what could happen if you're not eating.' Imeh's videos mention more extreme potential health outcomes of eating disorders, like organ failure and hair loss. But he also sometimes mocks the messaging found in pro-eating disorder communities. In one TikTok, he's eating with a text overlay that says 'none of your friends are gonna be jealous that your Ed made you look like a skeleton baby pick up the fork.' Imeh says he's not trolling, but stating 'literal facts' that he doesn't sugarcoat. 'One thing I noticed in Gen Z, especially my generation, is that they will only stop doing something if they're embarrassed by it,' he says. 'I got a lot of people emailing me and DMing me like 'Stephen you've helped me so much with my eating disorder.'' He has over 70,000 followers, many of whom began following him after he took on eating disorder communities. Pillepich says she can see a modern, 'chronically online' approach working to redirect attention and ideally get people who need it into recovery. 'Leading with nuance doesn't get people's attention. It does have to be more extreme, more funny, whatever it is,' Pillepich said. 'If that gets someone to the first step of seeing a dietician, a therapist, working on the deeper issues, then that's great, too.' Breithaupt said that content that is too judgmental or makes people with eating disorders feel ashamed could make them less likely to get help. 'The most effective anti-ED content tends to validate the pain beneath the disorder while still rejecting the behaviors,' she says. 'When content creators use humor or mockery to push back against pro-ED culture, there's a real risk that viewers—especially those actively struggling—won't just see the disorder being criticized, they'll feel like they are being mocked.' E said that TikTok content like Imeh's helped her realize how 'stupid' SkinnyTok was. She said she has started watching eating disorder recovery content, instead. But the algorithm still shows her 'harsh motivation' for weight loss in addition to recovery videos. In late 2024, TikTok banned a controversial weight loss influencer whose content glorified extreme thinness. E thinks TikTok should ban more of 'SkinnyTok,' although pro-eating disorder communities have historically migrated to other platforms when that happens. Eating disorder recovery practitioners say that posting anti-'SkinnyTok' videos on the same platform is likely helpful, but that it's only a first step. 'What I work with most people on is limiting social media,' Breithaupt said. 'Doing something else rather than engaging in social media is more helpful toward recovery, even if you're watching recovery-oriented videos.' The National Alliance for Eating Disorders Helpline provides support, resources and information about treatment options at 1-866-662-1235, Monday through Friday. You can also text 'ALLIANCE' to 741741 if you are experiencing a crisis to be contacted by a trained volunteer. More information about eating disorders, including other free and low-cost support options, can be found on the National Eating Disorder Association's website.
