Eating disorder videos being recommended to young girls
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What evidence shows YouTube is recommending eating disorder content to young teens?
Despite new online safety legislation, YouTube is still recommending videos promoting eating disorders to girls as young as 13. The UK's Centre for Countering Digital Hate set up a simulated account for a 13-year-old girl viewing unsafe diet and body image content for the first time. It found that one in 10 videos recommended by YouTube's UpNext algorithm featured thinspiration, extreme calorie restriction or other harmful material. For more on this, I'm joined by Elaine Burke, journalist and host of the For Tech's Sake podcast, Harriet Parsons, CEO of BodyWise, and Elsa-Jane Johnson, who is a lived experience advocate. Good morning to you all. You're very welcome and thanks for joining us. Elaine, if I could go to you first, what sort of content are we talking about here?
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.
Yeah. And this, the report mentioned YouTube. Does it happen on other platforms? TikTok, for instance?
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. in this context. So if you're just constantly being fed images of thin bodies and that itself can be harmful, even though those pieces of content might be never flagged as dangerous in any way, it's the volume and the way they're recommended as well that can be a problem for people.
Okay, Elaine, thanks for that. Harriet Parsons, CEO of BodyWise. Are you in any way surprised by this?
No, not surprised at all. I mean, that's always been the pattern, hasn't it? That we're presented with images that are deemed ideal or inspirational. And we compare ourselves then to those images and usually compare negatively. And then in that space in between, you It breeds that kind of normative discontent that we don't feel that we're good enough. And so then we're marketed products and services to try and achieve what we think will make us better. And it's the kind of conflation of, you know, looking better or being the right size or eating the right way or exercising the right way with being a better person and having a better life.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What evidence shows YouTube is recommending eating disorder content to young teens?
0:00–4:17
2
What kinds of 'thinspiration' and harmful diet advice are appearing in recommended videos?
4:17–7:49
3
Does this algorithm-driven recommendation problem occur on platforms beyond YouTube?
7:49–9:16
4
How do algorithms amplify subtle and apparently 'innocuous' body-image content?
9:16–13:32