#SkinnyTok rebranded eating disorders dangerously fast

NEW YORK – #SkinnyTok is dead. Or at least that is what TikTok wants you to believe after its recent ban of the hashtag promoting an extreme thin ideal.

That might have appeased regulators, but it should not satisfy parents of teens on the app. An army of influencers is keeping the trend alive, putting vulnerable young people in harm’s way.

Today’s social media landscape makes it all too easy for creators to repackage and disguise disordered eating as a “healthy” part of everyday life.

That lifestyle then gets monetised on various platforms – via habit trackers, group chats and 30-day aspirational challenges – and shared with a much broader audience.

The rise of #SkinnyTok is, in many ways, a rehashing of the pro-eating disorder content of the past.

In the mid-1990s, it was British supermodel Kate Moss and “heroin chic”. Then came the Tumblr posts in the early aughts praising “Ana” and “Mia”, fictional characters that stood for anorexia and bulimia.

Now, it is 23-year-old influencer Liv Schmidt telling her followers to “eat wise, drop a size”.

Ms Schmidt, a prominent #SkinnyTok influencer who is often credited with lopping the “y” off of “skinny” and replacing it with an “i”, is the founder of the members-only group Skinni Societe. In September 2024, she was

banned from TikTok

 amid scrutiny by The Wall Street Journal.  

Resurgence of problematic content

The fact that she continues to make headlines some nine months later drives home the perpetual game of whack-a-mole that regulators are playing with problematic content.

After her TikTok ban, Ms Schmidt simply moved her audience over to Instagram, where her followers have grown from 67,000 to more than 320,000.

Until recently, she was charging people US$20 (S$26) a month for a “motivational” group chat, but when New York magazine The Cut found at least a dozen of those users were in high school, Meta demonetised her profile in May.

And yet her Instagram account still exists, and she is actively posting to her YouTube channel. A video titled How To Create A Skinni Body On A Budget raked in nearly 50,000 views within a week. This is a particularly disturbing level of engagement, considering she is encouraging her viewers to consume fewer than 1,000 calories a day – far less than what health officials recommend for a nutrient-dense meal.

In her Instagram bio, Ms Schmidt links to a Google application where anyone can apply to her Skinni Societe. While membership previously cost just US$20 a month, screenshots posted on social media suggest this latest iteration could run about US$2,900 a month – a gulf that proves her schtick is a complete black box.

Regardless of price point,  she continues to use public platforms to lure people into private spaces where conversations promoting disordered eating can flourish unchecked – all while profiting from them. 

Bloomberg Opinion made several attempts to reach out to Ms Schmidt for comment, but she did not respond.

This sort of content is causing real harm. Ms Johanna Kandel, founder and chief executive officer of the National Alliance for Eating Disorders, said the uptick in callers mentioning #SkinnyTok to her organisation’s hotline began in winter 2024.

And despite social media companies’ efforts to blunt the reach of the trend, as many as one in five calls fielded by the non-profit in recent weeks have referenced the hashtag.

Some of those callers had past struggles with an eating disorder that was restarted by the hashtag, while others started following #SkinnyTok to “better themselves” or “get healthy”, only to be pulled into a precarious mental space, Ms Kandel says. 

The bombardment of images of a skinny ideal can have even broader harms. Although this type of content has always lurked in the dark corners of the internet, people had to actively seek it out. Now, the algorithm delivers it on a platter. That is being served in insidious ways.

While Ms Schmidt’s rhetoric may leave little to the imagination, other influencers frame their content more subliminally. 

They encourage a disciplined lifestyle that blurs the lines of health-consciousness and restrictive eating, which makes it all the more difficult to detect. Walk 15,000 steps a day, drink tea, nourish the body – these are things that might not raise alarm bells if a parent were to find them on his or her kid’s social feeds.

Sure, the TikTok trends that do raise alarm bells – remember “legging legs”? – are quick to get shut down. But what about something as seemingly innocuous as the popular “what I eat in a day” videos? How are social media companies expected to police troubling content that is cloaked in euphemisms such as “wellness” and “self-care”?

It is a question that weighs on wellness and lifestyle creators who are trying their best to combat the negative content out there.

Young women at highest risk

When speaking with Ms Kate Glavan, a 26-year-old influencer, it is clear why she has been vocal about her experience with disordered eating. 

“I don’t know a single woman who hasn’t struggled with some sort of body image or food issue,” she said.

“The only thing that snapped me out of my eating disorder was learning how it was destroying my health. I had a doctor look at my blood work and tell me I had the bone density of a 70-year-old woman at age 17.”

Whether that would work on today’s 17-year-olds is up for debate.

“A lot of younger Gen Zs now believe that everything is rigged – schools, doctors, the government. That paranoia has created a distrust of expertise itself,” Ms Glavan said. “They think the whole medical system is corrupt, so they turn to influencers instead – which is incredibly dangerous.”

How dangerous? University of Toronto assistant professor Amanda Raffoul, who studies eating disorders, says there is “a pretty solid body of evidence that the more young people, in particular, spent time online and on social media, the more likely they are to have poor body image and negative thoughts about their appearance, and to be engaging in harmful eating-related behaviours”.

For example, a 2023 review of 50 studies found that social media leads to peer comparisons and internalisation of a “thin” ideal, which together contribute to body image anxiety, poor mental health and, for some, disordered eating.

That effect is exacerbated when someone has certain risk factors – they are female or have a high BMI, for example – and are exposed to content that encourages eating disorders.

The danger is most acute in adolescent girls. That skinny ideal can elicit strong emotions and feelings of inadequacy at a time when they do not yet have the tools to separate reality from fiction.

But researchers also see a worrisome trend in adolescent boys who have been drawn in by “fit-fluencers” pushing obsessive muscle training, unproven supplements and restrictive diets.

After a 2021 Wall Street Journal investigation revealed Meta was fully aware of Instagram’s potential to pull teen girls into a body image spiral, social media companies have offered some guardrails around problematic content. Ms Kandel says when her non-profit starts to hear multiple callers mentioning specific body image-related hashtags, it notifies companies, which typically are quick to shut them down.

While helpful, it also feels like the companies are doing the bare minimum to protect kids. Although eating disorder researchers can glean insights from individual social feeds, they still cannot get their hands on the internal data that could help them identify who is most at risk of harm and craft better safeguards.

For adolescents, the most powerful solution would be to step away from social media. Research shows spending less time scrolling can improve body image in struggling teens and young adults.

But if that is not realistic, parents and teachers could help them think more critically about what they are seeing online – and how influencers such as Ms Schmidt make money by chipping away at their self-esteem. BLOOMBERG