· 2016
#thyghgapp
- 262citations
- 2016year
Short summary
Pro-eating disorder (pro-ED) communities on Instagram circumvent moderation by using increasingly complex, non-standard lexical variants of banned tags, leading to 15-30% increased participation and support for pro-ED content.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Pro-ED communities on Instagram use non-standard lexical variants to bypass tag restrictions.
- The complexity of these lexical variants has increased over time.
- Communities using lexical variants show 15-30% higher participation and support for pro-ED content.
- Content associated with variant tags is more toxic, self-harm-oriented, and vulnerable.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Pro-eating disorder (pro-ED) communities on social media encourage the adoption and maintenance of disordered eating habits as acceptable alternative lifestyles rather than threats to health. In particular, the social networking site Instagram has reacted by banning searches on several pro-ED tags and issuing content advisories on others. We pre-sent the first large-scale quantitative study investigating pro-ED communities on Instagram in the aftermath of moderation -- our dataset contains 2.5M posts between 2011 and 2014. We find that the pro-ED community has adopted non-standard lexical variations of moderated tags to circumvent these restrictions. In fact, increasingly complex lexical variants have emerged over time. Communities that use lexical variants show increased participation and support of pro-ED (15-30%). Finally, the tags associated with content on these variants express more toxic, self-harm, and vulnerable content. Despite Instagram's moderation strategies, pro-ED communities are active and thriving. We discuss the effectiveness of content moderation as an intervention for communities of deviant behavior.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source., 2016 · DOI ↗
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Field: Music
MusicArts and Humanities