Watching just 8 minutes of TikTok can have ‘immediate negative consequences’: study says

TikTok boasts more than a billion monthly active users worldwide.Photo byKaspars Grinvalds - stock.adobe.com

A steady diet of weight loss TikToks may be quite harmful to mental health, a new study finds.

Excessive use of social media, particularly engaging with content that promotes anorexia, might harm a young woman's self-worth and heighten her susceptibility to unhealthy eating habits, as indicated by a study from Charles Sturt University in Australia.

“Our study showed that less than 10 minutes of exposure to implicit and explicit pro-anorexia TikTok content had immediate negative consequences for body image states and internalization of appearance ideals,” the researchers said about their findings, published Wednesday in PLOS ONE.

Spending a lot of time on TikTok especially watching pro-anorexia content could damage a young woman’s self-esteemPhoto byShutterstock / Aleksandra Suzi

“Psychological harm can occur for young female TikTok users even when explicit pro-anorexia content is not sought out and when TikTok use is of a short duration,” they added.

The application has over a billion users each month across the globe. Studies were conducted with university freshmen in Australia, with the majority of the female participants not completing the first survey. A total of 273 women aged between 18 and 28 completed the necessary criteria for participation.

Study participants exposed to pro-anorexia content felt worse about themselves while internalizing the belief that it's important to be thinPhoto byShutterstock / ronstik

Participants were questioned regarding their use of TikTok, their perceptions of body image, and their views on beauty norms, while the researchers searched for signs of eating disorders and assessed their susceptibility to orthorexia — a condition characterized by an unhealthy fixation on "clean" or "healthy" foods.

Half of the group then spent seven to eight minutes viewing content related to disordered eating on TikTok, which included young women engaging in self-starvation, offering advice on weight loss methods like consuming ice and chewing gum to suppress appetite, or endorsing exercises or juice cleanses to showcase their slim figures.

The remaining participants watched content that was not related to eating disorders, such as nature, cooking, animals, or humor.

After watching the videos, both groups experienced a decline in satisfaction with their body image. Those who were exposed to content that promoted anorexia felt particularly dissatisfied with themselves and internalized the notion that thinness is crucial.

Women who spent more than two hours a day on TikTok were more likely to exhibit disordered eating behaviors, although this correlation was not statistically significant, according to the researchers.

The study authors are recommending “more stringent controls and regulations” on pro-anorexia, disordered eating and body-related TikTokPhoto byViktor – stock.adobe.com

To address this issue, the researchers suggest implementing "tougher restrictions and oversight" on content promoting anorexia, unhealthy eating habits, and body image issues on TikTok.

“There are current steps being taken to delete dangerous content, including blocking searches such as ‘#anorexia,’ however, there are various ways users circumvent these controls and further regulation is required,” the researchers wrote.

The information for this research was gathered in the middle of 2021, almost three years prior to TikTok's update of its community guidelines in April to tackle content related to harmful weight loss.

The platform doesn’t allow “showing or promoting disordered eating and dangerous weight loss behaviors.”

A spokesperson for TikTok on Wednesday stated that it is striving to provide a varied and secure experience for users, recognizing that what may be triggering for one individual might not be for another.

At the same time, President Biden passed a law in April that requires TikTok's owner ByteDance to sell the app by January 19, 2025, or face a complete shutdown due to concerns over data security.

TikTok and ByteDance have appealed this decision in federal court, with hearings set for next month.