chapotraphouse

Eating disorder.

Imagine a social media echo chamber of only people with severe body dysmorphia, anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder, in which they actively encourage one another to worsen the severity of their eating disorder, switch their non-anorexic ED habits out for anorexia, and post edited body photos to encourage others' dysmorphia, and attempt to become models or influencers based on their body mass and unhealthy relationship with food.

None of this violates social media TOSes and the algo seems to really like spreading this type of content to people susceptible to taking psychic damage from it because it results in obsessive use of the social media platform. This content causes lots of people to relapse, and does real harm both to the poster and the users viewing it. Other eating disorder sufferers trying to avoid the toxic mutual encouragement of their disorder have no recourse or option to avoid it, other than resetting their algorithm repeatedly or entirely disengaging from all social media platforms permanently. Obviously that has pretty dramatic social consequences, especially for the demographics most susceptible to this sort of ED related peer pressure.

Seemingly, the method for "catharsis" in order to counter this content has become the occasional singling out of individual social media users who post this content and public shaming of them in other social media spaces. Obviously this doesn't actually help anything, it's just the public bullying of some random teenage girl.

This is a real issue on social media for young women, and the only solution is the same as all other issues on social media: