Abstract
Information technologies, like social media platforms, have made the formation of communities easier through the invention of online spaces. Not restricted to local face-to-face interactions, harmful communities can thrive on social media platforms thanks to the reach and confidentially such platforms give them. This paper explores how the anorexic community (pro-ana community) uses refracted publics to circumvent social media platform TikTok’s algorithm to promote anorexic ideas.
With the evolution of information technologies and the rise of virtual communities, social media platforms have facilitated the formation of community subsets based around the shared interests of individual users. As these platforms bring together users from across the world, there is a wide variety of communities of interest, with each community having the potential to influence their members positively or negatively. As such, harmful communities – like the pro-ana community on TikTok – have found social media platforms effective spaces to disseminate their messages. With TikTok’s content moderation guidelines becoming tighter, the pro-ana community on TikTok use refracted publics to survive on the platform. While the pro-ana community uses many refracted publics, this paper explores three: social stenography, hashtag jacking and user anonymity. Encouragingly, the anti-pro-ana community is growing on TikTok and has been hijacking the pro-ana space. Although the use of refracted publics has allowed the pro-ana community’s survival on TikTok, as platforms and users gain awareness of the strategies they use, moderators can learn and adapt to find and eliminate pro-ana content, making it harder for the community to share content and persist as a community.
The Negatives of Social Media Communities: How the Pro-Ana Community Circumvents TikTok’s Algorithm with Refracted Publics
Introduction
Not all community is positive community. Networked publics, as both a space and an audience, facilitate virtual interactions between individuals on a global scale. The creation of social media tools like follower lists and hashtags have facilitated the formation of subsets of individuals based on shared interests, called ‘public spheres’ and ‘communities of interest’ by media scholar Axel Bruns. Unfortunately, harmful communities like the pro-anorexia (pro-ana) community are also facilitated on social media platforms – specifically TikTok. Through examining socio-cultural anthropologist Crystal Abidin’s ‘refracted publics’ concept, it becomes clear that the pro-ana community uses refracted publics to circumvent TikTok’s algorithm to promote anorexic ideas.
Community
With many varied, and sometimes conflicting, ideas on the definition of ‘community’, sociologist and professor Gerard Delanty writes of two themes common among the multitude of definitions: belonging and sharing. Communities are based on sociality, with communication between community members essential for the continuation of any kind of community. With the advance of globalisation and modern communication technologies, and increasing individualism, previous views that look at community as a place-based phenomenon have become outdated (Delanty, 2018; Blackshaw, 2009). Nowadays, as communication technologies free communication from face-to-face interaction, communities can be created over other modes of communication based on new forms of belonging rather than the traditional cultural structures of family, neighbourhood, class, et cetera, that communication – and thereby community – used to be restricted to (Delanty, 2018). One such mode is the internet, which has facilitated the rise of virtual communities.
Virtual Communities
Virtual communities (also termed ‘technologically-mediated communities’ by Delanty [2018]) allow individuals to join other individuals in shaping communities online without needing to share a location, history or demographic similarity (Blackshaw, 2009). As people choose which virtual communities they join, Yang et al. write that they tend to group “according to their identities, ideologies, and other preferences, and form communities that offer sociability, support, and a sense of identity” (2021, p. 150); however, members’ ties to each other are weak, being strangers offline (Blackshaw, 2009; Delanty, 2018; Yang et al., 2021). Such sparsely-connected communities are particularly seen on social media platforms, termed ‘networked publics’ by social scientist and technologist danah boyd.
Networked Publics
Networked publics are both an audience and a space brought together through networked technology (boyd, 2010). Social media platforms, as networked publics, provide public spaces that facilitate (or mediate) interaction between platforms’ users and have the potential to be accessed on a global scale (boyd, 2008). Through tools like ‘friend’ and ‘follower’ lists on social media sites, users can set boundaries around what content they see and whom they disseminate content to within personal media ‘feeds’ (boyd & Marwick, 2011). Using and following hashtags is another way users can disseminate and engage with issue-specific content (Ma & Zhang, 2022). These tools allow users to segment the content they see, creating subsets based around shared interests within networked publics which media scholar Axel Bruns calls ‘public spheres’, and specifically ‘communities of interest’ if the public is long-lasting (2023; Bruns & Highfield, 2015).
Anorexia & Social Media
Anorexia nervosa (anorexia) is an eating disorder common in females involving unhealthy obsession over body image and weight. People with anorexia fear weight gain and restrict their food intake to maintain a low body weight (Eating Disorders Victoria, 2024; Moore & Bokor, 2023). Studies conducted over the past decade suggest links between eating disorders and social media usage (Frieiro Padin et al., 2021).
Though social media can foster supportive community relationships, as asserted by Hampton & Wellman (2018), supportive community is not always a good thing. The pro-anorexia (pro-ana) community of interest is an example of this; being active on most social media sites, the community has a global audience (Oksanen et al., 2016). Pro-eating-disorder (pro-ED) communities like pro-ana communities promote and endorse eating disorders (ED) over social media platforms as a “lifestyle choice rather than as disorders that ought to be treated”, writes Pruccoli et al. (2022, para. 4). Studied by Drs Oksanen et al., they found pro-ana community members feel motivated to lose unhealthy amounts of weight from the support of others and their sense of belonging, and the themes of “mutual support and solidarity” (2016, para. 2) are prevalent in posted pro-ana content, which foster strong emotional attachments (Oksanen et al., 2016).
TikTok is a social media platform centred around the creation and sharing of short-form videos. Released in 2016, it has now had more than 4.7 billion downloads (D’Souza, 2024). Unlike other social media platforms, the TikTok user experience is driven by the ‘For You algorithm’ (Bhandari & Bimo, 2022), an AI system that personalises the content a user sees in their feed through content interaction, manually set content preferences, device settings and video popularity (Peng, 2023).
Refracted Publics & The Pro-Ana Community
Out of boyd’s ‘networked publics’ concept, socio-cultural anthropologist Crystal Abidin conceived ‘refracted publics’. Abidin describes refracted publics as strategies social network users develop and use to evade (or, ‘circumvent’) social media platforms’ increasing surveillance and censorship due to tougher content moderation guidelines (Boccia Artieri et al., 2021). Particularly targeted social media communities of interest, such as the pro-anorexia (pro-ana) community, use refracted publics in their content and other communications to circumvent moderation, which allows their communities to survive on social media platforms without registering as the community they truly are – a community banned (or censored) by the algorithm. Refracted publics allow such communities to persist on these platforms “below the radar” (Abidin, 2021, p. 3). Abidin outlines four conditions observed in refracted publics: transience, discoverability, decodability and silosociality.
The anorexic community’s presence on TikTok is evidenced by the amount of pro-ana content available on the platform, despite harsher content moderation crackdowns (Logrieco et al., 2021), and the engagement it receives (Lookingbill et al., 2023). Pro-ana posts are easily searchable via key words and hashtags; even if some main pro-ana terms are now banned (like ‘thinpso’, thinspiration, and ‘ana’), by misspelling words, shortening them or searching diet and weight-loss related terms, you can find a wide range of pro-ana TikToks with thousands of views (TikTok, 2024). Hashtags such as #skinny have 390K posts, #thatgirl, a hashtag known to contain pro-ana dieting content (Ayguasanosa, 2022), has 1.2M posts, and #ed has 1M posts and seems to suggest more less-cryptic pro-ana and pro-ed content, though also suggests pro-ed-recovery content (TikTok, 2024). Pruccoli et al. found the most popular pro-ana hashtags used are #foryou and #ed (2022). Furthermore, researchers have found once a user interacts with pro-ana content, the algorithm will continue to suggest more in that user’s For You page since the algorithm is unable to distinguish between harmless and harmful content (Logrieco et al., 2021). Many users then pick up those behaviours and become anorexic themselves.
Along with popularising and glamourising anorexia and EDs, pro-ana personalities and pseudonymous TikTok accounts also become hubs for the pro-ana community, with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of young anorexic users posting pro-ana comments (Cooney, n.d.; MARIA, n.d.; Wl, n.d.). Some accounts have hundreds of thousands and up to millions of likes on specific posts and a view count often over 20 times the likes count, though their follower count is often low (TW ed, 2023).
Due to harsher community guidelines and content moderation on TikTok, the pro-ana community is becoming increasingly censored (Lookingbill et al., 2023). Therefore, the community has had to adapt for its survival on the platform – particularly to remain suggested on the algorithm while at the same time circumventing AI moderation. The pro-ana TikTok community’s circumventive strategies fulfil refracted public conditions set out by Abidin (2021). Transience: their online content is ephemeral (short-term), either removed by the creator after a set time of being posted or removed by TikTok moderators (this includes comments). Discoverability: For users to chance upon pro-ana content, they generally need to have interacted with similar content (for example, fitness and health content) that triggered TikTok’s algorithm to suggest the pro-ana content (Abidin, 2021; McKelvey & Hunt, 2019). Decodability: Content can be copied and shared, but out of the pro-ana community context it might be unintelligible to those who do not know pro-ana specific language, terms, references, mannerisms, etc. Finally, silosociality: Pro-ana content is made for other members of the pro-ana community and may be less accessible and understandable to outsiders (Abidin, 2021).
Using refracted publics, the pro-ana TikTok community can stay “below the radar” (Abidin, 2021, p. 3) while continuing to post content, communicate together and increase their membership. Three specific refracted public strategies the pro-ana TikTok community uses to circumvent TikTok’s content moderators are ‘social steganography’, ‘hashtag jacking’ (Abidin, 2021) and user anonymity (Yeshua-Katz & Hård af Segerstad, 2020).
Social steganography “skillfully encodes and embeds layers of meaning and subtext into an integrated piece of content” to ensure privacy (Abidin, 2021, p. 7). The pro-ana TikTok community’s use of social steganography involves coded words and hashtags like ‘#thinspo’, ‘#meanspo’ (Lookingbill et al., 2023), ‘TW ed’ and ‘wieiad’ (TikTok, 2024) that require pro-ana context behind them to be able to understand them. ‘Pro-ana’ is code itself for pro-anorexia, however became too popularised and is now banned. The pro-ana community also uses misspellings, termed ‘algospeak’ by Klug et al. (2023), like ‘#thinsrpø’ instead of #thinspo (Ayguasanosa, 2022) and ‘thyghgapp’ instead of thigh gap (Gerrard, 2018), as regular terms are progressively banned (Pruccoli et al., 2022).
Hashtag jacking is “to occupy, hijack, or create trending hashtags to redirect attention to another cause.” (Abidin, 2021, p. 6) Pro-ana content creators tend to use harmless-sounding hashtags such as #health #wellness #fitness #nutrition that are seen as promoting healthy lifestyles (TikTok, 2024). In this way, they label their content as ‘harmless’ (effectively hiding themselves from moderators) and promote their content to users who view health-and-wellness-focused content (Ayguasanosa, 2022). Another hijacked hashtag is #foryou, with the pro-ana community using this hashtag to manipulate the algorithm to recommend pro-ana content on users’ For You pages (Pruccoli et al., 2022). Previously harmless hashtags such as ‘#fitspiration’ and ‘#wieiad’ are now known pro-ana hashtags because of hashtag jacking (Gerrard, 2018).
Finally, user anonymity gives members of the pro-ana community privacy on open-access platforms like TikTok. Pro-ana members are freed from the scrutiny that would come with using personal accounts and birth names, and so feel more comfortable in sharing pro-ana content. In fact, one pro-ana member told researchers Yeshua-Katz & Hård af Segerstad, “The “pro-ana” community would probably not exist if it weren’t for anonymity.” (2020, para. 60) Often pro-ana community members have pseudonymous second or third accounts dedicated to their pro-ana activities (Yeshua-Katz & Hård af Segerstad, 2020) and pro-ana account follower counts tend to be low, yet engagement – via views, likes and comments on those accounts – tends to be strangely high – sometimes in the millions (TikTok, 2024). Possibly a tactic to both reduce the visibility of an account low (from moderators) and keep regular users and moderators from linking pro-ana accounts together.
The Anti-Pro-Ana Community
Encouragingly, despite the tremendous amount of pro-ana content still available on TikTok, the pro-ED-recovery (also called anti-pro-ana [Logrieco et l., 2021]) space is growing quickly and the community has been hashtag jacking (Abidin, 2021) pro-ana hashtags (Lookingbill et al., 2023). This means pro-ana users are likely to see the pro-ED-recovery content with the possibility that they will be positively impacted by it. With pressure increasing on TikTok to do more to completely remove ED-related from the platform (Little, 2021; Roy, 2023; Wilson, 2020), and with increased public awareness of the refracted publics these communities use (Logrieco et al., 2021), it looks more likely that TikTok will one day become a platform known for its pervasive and supportive ED recovery community rather than its pro-ana one.
Conclusion
Thanks to communication technology, community has been expanded from a face-to-face phenomenon to something that can be technologically-mediated with global capacity. Virtual communities, like networked publics on social media platforms, facilitate public spheres or communities of interest that are created around the shared interests of individuals. Unfortunately, globally concentrated community can be harmful, as illustrated by the pro-ana community on TikTok. Despite TikTok’s harsher moderation guidelines, the pro-ana community uses refracted publics to circumvent TikTok’s algorithm to promote anorexic ideas. This is evidenced through the pro-ana community’s pervasive presence on TikTok, their circumventive strategies’ fulfilment of Abidin’s refracted public conditions (2021) and their use of specific refracted publics such as social steganography, hashtag jacking and user anonymity on TikTok. However, as moderation becomes stricter and the pro-ED-recovery community grows on TikTok, there is hope for a healthier future on the platform. Though harmful social media communities can remain under the radar with refracted publics, user and platform awareness of these strategies may be able to weed such communities out in the end.
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