TikTok and body image: eight minutes can harm young women

Almost half of young Australians are unhappy with the appearance of their bodies.

For young people, social media has exacerbated body image concerns, encouraging comparisons with others and the pursuit of beauty ideals that are frequently unattainable – and unhealthy.

TikTok, a platform for making and viewing short-form videos, now has more than 1 billion users. Videos that can cause harm, including content that glorifies disordered eating and exceptionally thin bodies, can spread easily across the platform.

As TikTok's audience is largely young, we investigated the impact of this material on young women's body image. Our recent study showed that viewing only eight minutes of TikTok posts about dieting, weight loss and exercise immediately reduced body image satisfaction.

Body image and beauty standards

We enlisted 273 female-identifying TikTok users between 18 and 28 years old, then randomly assigned them to one of two groups. Anyone with a previous or current diagnosis of an eating disorder was not included in the research.

Those in the experimental group watched a 7–8 minute compilation of "pro-anorexia" and "fitspiration" videos sourced directly from TikTok. The clips showed young women limiting their food consumption and offering exercise guidance and diet advice, including accounts of juice cleanses used for weight loss.

The control group instead viewed a 7–8 minute collection of TikTok videos with "neutral" material, including nature, cooking and animal videos.

We used several questionnaires to assess body image satisfaction and attitudes to beauty standards both before and after participants viewed the TikTok material.

Body image satisfaction fell in both groups after watching the videos compared with beforehand. However, the largest drop was among those who saw pro-anorexia content. This group also showed greater internalisation of beauty standards.

Internalisation refers to accepting and identifying with beauty ideals imposed externally. Encountering damaging social media content does not invariably cause harm – body image is more likely to be affected when that material is internalised.

Before the video experiment, participants answered general questions about how they used TikTok. We also assessed their preoccupation with "healthy" eating and symptoms associated with disordered eating.

Participants who spent over two hours per day on TikTok reported more disordered eating behaviours than people who used it less often. However, the difference was not statistically significant. In other words, it did not reach the required threshold for concluding that chance was unlikely to explain the variation between the groups.

On a scale for assessing eating disorder symptoms, people reporting high (2–3 hours a day) or extreme (more than 3 hours a day) TikTok use had average scores slightly below the threshold for clinically significant eating disorder symptoms.

This indicates that spending more than two hours daily exposed to TikTok content could be associated with disordered eating, although further research is required to examine this link.

Harmful TikTok content is widespread

The material presented to the experimental group is widely shared on TikTok, rather than being confined to "pro-ana" communities. "Clean" eating, detoxes and limited-ingredient diet fads are disordered eating in wolf's clothing, enabling diet culture to be repackaged as "wellness" and "self-care".

Alongside fitspiration, this content can reward and turn excessive exercise and disordered eating into a game.

Wellness influencers on social media also have a significant role in making disordered eating and fitspiration content seem normal.

Yet hashtags such as #GymTok and #FoodTok let any TikTok user make and consume posts about their own and other people's daily eating habits, weight-loss transformations and exercise routines.

Moreover, ordinary users may distribute harmful diet-related videos without attracting the criticism that a celebrity or prominent influencer could face for posting socially irresponsible content.

Our research considered only the short-term effects of being exposed to this type of TikTok content. Longitudinal studies are needed to establish whether the negative effects we identified persist over time.

It remains difficult to censor

TikTok users have little control over what they see. Much of their time is spent on a personalised "For You" page shaped by an algorithm, meaning they can encounter disordered eating content without searching for it or following accounts that post it.

In the study, 64% of participants said they had encountered disordered eating content on their For You page. This might include videos depicting binge eating, laxative use or excessive exercise.

Counterintuitively, looking for body positivity content can leave users susceptible to encountering disordered eating material.

The key action TikTok users can take is recognising that searching for or following any food, body or exercise-related content may unintentionally expose them to distorted body ideals. Spending less time on TikTok reduces this exposure, but our findings indicate that even under ten minutes may have a negative impact.

Ultimately, young people's online safety relies on suitable regulation of social media. Without it, teaching young women how to avoid harm on social media is somewhat like handing them an inflatable life jacket before leaving them to swim endlessly against a rip.

If you need support, consider contacting the Butterfly Foundation Helpline (1800 33 4673) or chat with them online. For emergency crisis support, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

Madison Blackburn co-authored the research this article is based on.

Rachel Hogg, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Charles Sturt University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.