Elaine Burke

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22 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 21 Jul

Elaine Burke’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Today with David McCullagh · Eating disorder videos being recommended to young girls · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

So, yeah, that kind of description that you gave there, the thinspo genre of content, it is essentially...

giving people advice on how to make themselves as thin as possible.

And sometimes it's couched to look a bit like the kind of fitness and wellness advice that's very, very popular content online.

But the kind of advice that's being given is, you know, recommending a calorie, a daily calorie count of 170 calories, which is certainly going to underfeed anyone.

And there's even one piece of content recommending advice that would give you the most emaciated, skeletal, beautiful body.

So actually using those terms as a positive.

So they can be quite extreme.

Absolutely.

This is a type of content that performs well online.

And one of the challenges there is that you have algorithms that drive a lot of the recommendations of content.

So that's what this study looked at.

The content that was being recommended based on the habits of a dummy profile that they set up.

And there was also some very interesting research very recently coming out of UCD that looked at Irish teenagers' use of social media.

And they are aware that these algorithms are feeding them content based on things that they may have encountered already.

And they talk about in the interviews for this research about trying to quickly scroll past things that they don't want to see again, because if you even dwell for more than a second on something, that might trigger that to become part of your recommendations landscape, essentially.

And something to be really aware of here is that while the content that I mentioned earlier is quite extreme and quite obviously dangerous,

When you're trying to identify harmful content in this space in particular, it's actually quite a delicate editorial matter.

And I know this from working as an editor as well, that when you're talking about things like eating disorders, even the imagery that you use accompanying such content, you have to be very, very careful about.

Computer moderated algorithms don't take that kind of care and attention on things.

And even the volume of seemingly innocuous content can become harmful.

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