Eating Disorders and Social Media Prove Difficult to Untangle
The New York Times
Social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram try to monitor for content related to the problem, but it is not always clear what to do about it.
A 27-year-old YouTube star, prodded by her millions of followers with concerns about her health. A 19-year-old TikTok creator who features posts about being skinny. Teen communities throughout the internet, cleverly naming and culling their discussions to avoid detection.
They present a nearly intractable problem for social media companies under pressure to do something about material on their services that many people believe is causing harm, particularly to teenagers.
Those concerns came into sharp focus in recent weeks in a pair of Senate subcommittee hearings: the first featuring a Facebook executive defending her company, and the second featuring a former Facebook employee turned whistle-blower who bluntly argued that her former employer’s products drove some young people toward eating disorders.
