How Stigmatizing Ads Can Reach Teens, Despite Social Media Safeguards
Even with filters in place to protect users from content that promotes eating disorders, lots still reach youth
Dear readers - I hope you’re doing well! This week, I’m thrilled to feature a guest post from teacher . I first got to know her when she created the Ditching Diet Culture at School toolkit, and we were both interviewed in ’s fantastic book “Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture.” She’s doing really cool things.
Here’s how Cait describes herself: I am an award-winning middle school teacher, fat studies scholar, mental health advocate and the creator of the Ditching Diet Culture at School Digital Resource Library. Currently working on a book!
Cait just launched her own Substack, and I encourage you to subscribe right now:
Here’s Cait’s latest essay:
Social Media May Have Safeguards for Teens, But Stigmatizing Ads Can Slip Through the Cracks
(and tell us a lot about what advertisers think of people in larger bodies).
Social media is to thank for the 21st century iteration of the body positivity movement, which is a historical and digital version of earlier fat acceptance movements that started in real life in the 1960s. Body positivity, however, has become fraught with problems; including the centering of the most normative bodies–thus, defeating the purpose of the movement at all. Body positivity, it seems, comes with certain limitations; there are rules for how one can express love for themselves, and just how much a person is allowed to love themselves before they are accused of “glorifying obesity.”
Alongside body positivity and content emphasizing size diversity, the digital age has welcomed a tidal wave of “pro ana” and “pro mia” accounts, which is shorthand for accounts promoting anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. Though body positivity in the digital space remains somewhat new, pro-eating disorder content does not. In 2001, Yahoo! removed more than 113 pro-ana websites from its servers. After that, websites like Tumblr, which gained popularity in the 2010s, became sources of “thinspiration.” Though the terms of use policies of many popular social media apps (which require users to certify that they are at least thirteen years old to use), big tech companies like Meta have been under fire for their perceived failure to protect users from content that promote eating disorders, especially minors. Since being open to scrutiny from the federal government, popular platforms like Instagram, Reddit and Tiktok have features that pick up on users who search for terms such as “anorexia” directly, and deliver pop-ups on their screen directing them to resources like the National Eating Disorders Association hotline and mental health support.
The option to report ads that promote such behavior has also been streamlined, but not enough to weed out harmful messaging that suggests users should shrink their bodies. Though explicit eating disorder content is blocked from ads on platforms like Meta, ads that promote products for weight loss and diet culture (especially under the guise of health) certainly still exist.
Between scrolling on any of my accounts, I have come across such sponsored ads personally–for somatic yoga workouts, workout equipment, and shapewear, to name a few. Receiving messages via advertising such as this relies on the notion that we hate our bodies, and that the ads giving revenue to Instagram and TikTok claim to have the solution to that self-doubt. Almost all the products they’re selling promise to deliver thinness, and thus, happiness or freedom.
Here are a few examples from my own social media feed:
I should note that I do not subscribe to, follow or engage with weight loss content or fitness accounts. I do, however, post and engage with a lot of fat positive content creators and body neutrality therapists and mental health professionals, who make content that encourages folks to heal their relationship with their bodies through means like intuitive eating and Health At Every Size (HAES) principles.
It’s interesting, but not surprising, that the targeted ads I often see, such as these, are focused on weight loss. Even our social media algorithm assumes that any content we engage in that promotes body love, body diversity, and HAES is fair game for being bombarded with weight loss advertising. This makes sense, given that algorithms that operate social media are made by humans, and the pervasiveness of disgust toward fat bodies is distinctly human.
The assumption made, whether by advertisers or AI, is that fat people need to see ads that will “help” us change something about ourselves. The Forbes Technology Council notes that digital ad spending reached over $491 billion globally in 2021. So all those ads I’m seeing? They’re sponsored by the companies who are collecting data about my follows, post engagement and assuming that it means weight loss is something I desire. When ads are “sponsored”, it means that the company creating the ad and selling the product are paying platforms like Meta to prioritize those sponsored advertisements in user feeds.
Since 91 percent of consumers are more encouraged to buy from ads that feel personalized to them, the companies buying ads on our social media are banking on our purchases as a return on the investment in “sponsored” status. Other issues regarding behavior-based targeted advertising and kids remain, and data privacy laws, save a few, are not all universal–at least not in the United States. When kids (and adults, for that matter) click through the wordy, jargon-filled legalese of terms of use and privacy agreements before making accounts, they often skip over the part that enables their data to be sold to third parties to match them to ads that they think will most likely lead to a purchase. Though laws like the U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) shields minors under thirteen from third-party data sharing, ads also pose a risk to adolescents’ self-esteem by making them believe they need to lose weight. If kids are searching for weight loss tips, eating disorder content, and “thinspiration”, the ads geared toward them will reflect the same content, putting them in an echo chamber of bad body image.
One more ad that comes up on my feed in various iterations frequently is for “somatic yoga” exercises for weight loss. This one in particular, however, I found striking for not only its use of mental health language, but for its cunning use of anti-fat tropes:
First and foremost, the notion that “plus sized” means “beginners” in terms of movement is reminiscent of the attitudes toward fat people and mobility we discussed in chapters one and two. Fat bodies can be, and are, athletic, capable, and don’t always need to be modified down to a “beginner” class activity level. The juxtaposition of ‘plus sized’ with ‘beginner’ codifies the stereotype of fat bodies as unmoving and sedentary.
The third item on the list is especially stereotypical; and signals to viewers that if bodies are ‘plus sized’, it must be because of some traumatic experience that they need to move past. It’s reminiscent of the false belief that “inside every fat person is a thin person waiting to come out,” which are, naturally of course, prone to “old trauma” and “procrastination.” and reminds me of the episode of This is Us when Kate (Chrissy Metz) goes to an adult weight loss retreat and bangs on the floor with drumsticks until she is in tears as she remembers her past; images such as this imply, in no uncertain terms, that there must be something broken about fat people; how else would we have gotten fat?
Advertisements like this that claim to help “heal trauma” without suggesting the help of a trained professional or guidance and counseling are part of the recent trend of increased therapy speak and self-diagnosis via social media. Though the internet is a valuable tool for connecting people to help, information and resources, it can also be a place where people who are already vulnerable spiral into taking on issues as big as eating disorders and mental illness themselves. Feedback loops and community are important tools for healing and treatment, and adolescent and young users of social media can be misguided by incomplete or inaccurate information, including those from ads meant to sell them something and that ultimately has their wallets, not their wellbeing, in mind.
The option to report these ads doesn’t always yield change, either. There is, of course, the “I don’t want to see this” option when coming across weight loss and pro-diet culture advertising content, but that doesn’t stop it from being shown to others with varying ranges of vulnerability and resilience to such messages promoting fraught relationships to one’s body in the name of “health.” Reporting ads for being ‘inappropriate’ might fall off the radar in this category, since weight loss is ubiquitously celebrated and seen as a positive lifestyle change and even an accomplishment by our larger culture. Reporting ads for products like shapewear, exercise equipment “guaranteed” to help one shed pounds, and exercises that promise to heal the trauma that it presumes led to fatness is a game of proverbial diet culture wack-a-mole. Like all advertisements, the goal of these ads is to get people to part with their money; but in this case, our self-doubt and weight anxiety is the product. Teaching teens to notice when they’re being sold half a story is an important skill in media literacy and criticality in general, but especially in the case of weight stigma, can help them navigate content—and encourage them to talk to us about it.
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