Trigger warning: Mentions of eating disorders and body image
In 2022, people have been nostalgic wishing for 2014 Tumblr to come back. People want to go back to the good ol’ days where they could post soft-grunge pictures and listen to The 1975 all hours of the day, except there was always something darker underneath the surface. One minute you can be scrolling through pictures of smoke and fire and the next you’re seeing pictures of sickly thin girls in knee-high socks. The hashtag ‘Pro-ana,” starts flooding the screens of thousands of girls.
Pro-ana is short for pro-anorexia, the content under this hashtag promoted extreme food restrictions and anorexic behavior to impressionable teenage girls. Pictures of collar bones and calorie charts were some of the things you’d see under that hashtag. You’d find blogs teaching young girls how to be stick thin and how to maintain that. Tips and tricks on how to avoid getting caught by your parents, teachers, and doctors flooded the site.
The community was huge, thousands of people would reblog posts of Barbie dolls posed next to toilets and text posts like, “skip dinner, end up thinner,” and “your stomach isn’t grumbling—it’s applauding.” Years before this, in 2012, Tumblr tried to block all pro-ana content from the site, but bloggers found other clever ways around the new guidelines. They usezeros instead of o’s and use the blue butterfly emoji to let other bloggers know they are pro-ed. Even today, in 2022, there are still very active pro-ana blogs that still post.
Munmum De Choudhury’s research paper, “Anorexia on Tumblr: A Characterization Study,” showed that social media interventions, like Tumblr attempting to ban pro-ana content, without educating teens left them feeling isolated and alone with their eating disorders because they didn’t know where to go to find accurate information on recovery. Deep in the pro-ana tag, you could find blogs dedicated to helping people find the proper resources for recovery, but after that ban, a lot of teens were left alone. It’s too late to dwell on the past of how Tumblr should have handled it and now it’s time to look at the present.
Where is pro-ana now? Well, it seems like TikTok filled the void Tumblr left. TikTok is a great platform for creativity but there is still room for improvement. On Occasion, depending on your ‘for you’ page you’ll find ‘What I Eat in a Day’ videos that normalize eating hardly anything as if it’s healthy. There are also times when a girl will just post herself dancing and people will comment, ‘Guess I’m not eating today.’ There are users on TikTok that will call out people for their pro-ana and thinspo behavior. Although more needs to be done than just a call out. Content that talks about eating disorders in an educational way need to be pushed forward more than content that is centering around enabling eating disorders.
References
De Choudhury, M. (2015, May). Anorexia on tumblr: A characterization study. In Proceedings of the 5th international conference on digital health 2015 (pp. 43-50).
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