Almost half of young Australians are unhappy with their body appearance. Social media has intensified body image issues among youth, making them compare themselves with others and aim for often unrealistic and unhealthy beauty ideals. TikTok, a platform for creating and watching short videos, has over a billion users. Harmful content, including videos promoting disordered eating and extreme thinness, is easily accessible there. Since most TikTok users are young, we wanted to investigate how such content affects young women’s body image. Our recent study discovered that watching just eight minutes of TikTok videos centered on dieting, weight loss, and exercise led to an immediate negative impact on body image satisfaction.
We enrolled 273 female-identifying TikTok users between 18 and 28 years old and randomly assigned them to two groups. Individuals with a past or current eating disorder diagnosis were not included in the study. Participants in the experimental group viewed a seven to eight-minute compilation of “pro-anorexia” and “fitspiration” content directly from TikTok. These clips showed young women restricting their food intake and offering workout advice and dieting tips, such as explaining their juice cleanse for weight loss. Participants in the control group watched a similar duration of TikTok videos featuring “neutral” content, including nature, cooking, and animals.
Using a range of questionnaires, we assessed levels of body image satisfaction and attitudes towards beauty standards before and after watching the TikTok content. Both groups reported a decrease in body image satisfaction after watching the videos. However, those exposed to pro-anorexia content experienced the largest decrease in body image satisfaction. They also showed an increase in the acceptance of beauty standards. Acceptance occurs when someone embraces and identifies with external beauty ideals. Watching harmful social media content does not always result in harm – it’s when this content is internalised that body image is more likely to be affected.
Before the video experiment, we asked participants some general questions about their use of TikTok. We also assessed their focus on “healthy” eating and signs of disordered eating. We found that participants who used TikTok for more than two hours a day showed more disordered eating behaviors than less frequent users. However, this difference was not statistically significant, meaning the difference between groups did not reach the level needed for it to be unlikely due to chance. On a scale that rates eating disorder symptoms, participants with high (two to three hours a day) and extreme (more than three hours a day) TikTok use averaged scores just below the threshold for clinically significant eating disorder symptoms.
This implies that more than two hours a day on TikTok may be associated with disordered eating, but further research is necessary to investigate this. The content we showed participants in the experimental group is commonly circulated on TikTok, not just within “pro-ana” communities. Trends like “clean” eating, detoxing, and limited-ingredient diets disguise disordered eating as “wellness” and “self-care.” This content, along with fitspiration, often makes excessive exercise and disordered eating rewarding and gamified. Social media wellness influencers play a key role in normalising disordered eating and fitspiration content. But hashtags like #GymTok and #FoodTok enable any TikTok user to create and view content about their and others’ daily eating habits, weight-loss changes, and workout routines.
Furthermore, regular users can spread dangerous diet-related videos without the backlash that a celebrity or well-known influencer might encounter for sharing irresponsible content. Our study only examined the short-term outcomes of exposure to this type of content on TikTok. Long-term research is needed to determine if the negative effects we observed persist over time. TikTok users have limited control over the content they encounter.
As they spend much time on a personalised “For You” page created by an algorithm, users don’t need to search for or follow disordered eating content to see it. In our study, 64 percent of participants reported encountering disordered eating content on their For You page. Examples might include videos showing binge eating, laxative use, or excessive exercise. Ironically, searching for body positivity content might expose users to more disordered eating content. The most important thing TikTok users can do is be aware that following or searching for any content related to food, body, or exercise could lead to unintentional exposure to distorted body ideals.
Keeping TikTok usage minimal will decrease exposure, but our findings indicate that even less than ten minutes can have a harmful impact. Ultimately, ensuring online safety for young people requires proper social media regulation. Without this, teaching young women how to avoid harm on social media is akin to giving them an inflatable life jacket, then having them swim indefinitely against a current.