Abstract
This paper investigates how TikTok’s algorithmic architecture reinforces harmful weight-loss ideologies through the proliferation of SkinnyTok, particularly in the wake of widespread social media discourse around pharmaceutical weight-loss aids like Ozempic. Positioned within the “Communities and Social Media” stream, the paper argues that TikTok’s affordances—such as its algorithmic “For You” feed, looping short-form videos, and participatory remix culture—create immersive digital filter bubbles that glamourise disordered eating and exacerbate body dissatisfaction. Drawing on contemporary research and Australian health discourse, the paper explores how trends like #WhatIEatInADay and fitspiration content blur the lines between wellness and aesthetic conformity, often repackaging disordered behaviours as aspirational lifestyles. These effects are particularly insidious for young Australian women, who face a cultural backdrop of neoliberal health messaging and limited digital literacy. Ultimately, the study reveals how TikTok’s unique mechanics foster a persistent and pervasive community centred on thinness, amplifying both the psychological risks and cultural consequences of digital body surveillance in a post-Ozempic era.
Filtered Realities: How TikTok’s Affordances Amplify SkinnyTok and Fuel Harmful Weight Loss Ideologies in a Post-Ozempic Era
Introduction
In the age of algorithmically curated content, social media platforms have become key sites for community formation and the circulation of cultural norms. TikTok is a fertile ground for examining how digital communities emerge around body image and health discourses. Through its unique affordances, TikTok enables the rapid proliferation of aesthetic ideals that disproportionately affect young women. Its interface, driven by algorithmic feedback loops, curates content based on user behaviour, ultimately shaping what users see and how they perceive themselves and others. This creates an environment where specific body types and lifestyles are showcased and continually reinforced.
The emergence of SkinnyTok—an umbrella term for TikTok content that glorifies thinness, weight loss, and rigid control over diet and exercise—illustrates how social media can foster communities that revolve around shared aesthetic values. SkinnyTok is not just a fringe subculture but a digitally pervasive community fuelled by TikTok’s algorithmic design. The content here is frequently cloaked in the language of health and wellness, making it difficult to distinguish between genuine lifestyle content and the glamorisation of disordered behaviours. Users are active consumers in co-producing and circulating content that works with dominant beauty standards.
In parallel, the rise of pharmaceutical interventions like Ozempic for weight loss—once a diabetes medication, now widely discussed on social media for its slimming effects—has reignited a global and national fixation on thinness. This post-Ozempic era brings a complex interplay between medical authority, popular culture, and algorithmic influence.
As a cultural amplifier, TikTok plays a central role in shaping how these ideologies are received and enacted in everyday life. Trends and transformations linked to weight loss are frequently showcased as aspirational content, blurring the lines between medical advice, personal achievement, and aesthetic conformity.
This paper, part of the “Communities and Social Media” stream, explores how TikTok’s design reinforces and perpetuates harmful weight-loss ideologies, particularly through the phenomenon known as SkinnyTok. Situated in a post-Ozempic era marked by the commodification of weight-loss drugs and a renewed cultural obsession with thinness, the platform’s mechanics and content culture contribute to a persistent digital filter bubble.
This paper argues that TikTok’s affordances create immersive digital filter bubbles that glamourise disordered eating (e.g., via SkinnyTok) and intensify body dissatisfaction among young Australian women uniquely affected by local health discourses and limited digital safeguards.
TikTok’s Affordances and the Filter Bubble
TikTok’s central mechanism—the algorithmically generated “For You” page—is a prime example of how social media affordances shape persistent and pervasive digital communities. Hampton (2016) argues that “persistent contact is a counterforce to mobility and has the potential to link lives across generations and over the life course in ways that closely resemble the structure of affiliation found in the preindustrial community” (p. 106). In this way, TikTok’s repeated exposure to specific aesthetics and ideologies—such as extreme thinness—creates a pseudo-communal environment that mimics traditional forms of social cohesion, but with dangerous implications for body image.
This phenomenon is what Hampton and Wellman (2018) call a “persistent and pervasive community,” where users are continually exposed to others’ lives and routines, generating a hyper-awareness of social norms (p. 646). As they note, “the ambient nature of digital communication technologies” enables pervasive awareness, which in TikTok’s case translates into constant visual contact with other users’ bodies, meals, and health routines (p. 646). TikTok’s platform affordances such as endless scroll, short-form looping video, and audio remixing contribute to a sense of relational persistence, offering little reprieve from the aesthetic values it perpetuates (Hampton, 2016).
This algorithmic persistence is not neutral. The For You page “reinforces exposure to similar content through user interaction,” thereby trapping users in aesthetic echo chambers (Blackburn & Hogg, 2024). Unlike earlier forms of media that lacked such affordances for sustained exposure, TikTok ensures that once a user interacts with weight-related or fitness content—even unintentionally—they are inundated with similar videos, escalating the intensity and narrowness of content they receive (Hampton, 2016).
Moreover, TikTok’s emphasis on remixability and mimicry through trends and challenges intensifies the pressure to conform. Features like “duets” and “stitches” do not merely enable participation—they prompt users to compare themselves to others actively. In the case of body-focused content, this can lead to performance anxiety and deepening body surveillance. TikTok’s architecture, in effect, blurs the boundary between entertainment and self-discipline, producing a cycle of consumption and comparison that is difficult to escape.
SkinnyTok and Glamorised Disordered Eating
SkinnyTok is emblematic of how seemingly benign trends can mask and glamourise disordered eating. The #WhatIEatInADay trend, for example, often presents itself as a health-focused movement, but upon closer analysis, it can promote unhealthy or even dangerous eating behaviours. Davis et al. (2023) observe that “despite the seemingly innocuous or even health-promoting appearance of these videos, the content may promote unhealthy or disordered eating behaviours” (p. 2). Users perform normativity through curated meals and body-centric visuals that align with thinness ideals, reinforcing the cultural equation between discipline, health, and desirability (Davis et al., 2023).
Indeed, these videos are about more than food—they represent a kind of moral performance. Davis et al. (2023) found that such content is often designed to signal “control, productivity, and lifestyle curation” (p. 5), reinforcing the moral value attached to thinness. By presenting these ideals in a highly aestheticised, fast-paced format, TikTok enables users to internalise unattainable standards rapidly. Blackburn and Hogg (2024) found that “women exposed to pro-anorexia content displayed the greatest decrease in body image satisfaction and an increase in internalisation of societal beauty standards.” This holds true even when users view content that appears neutral or motivational.
Beyond dietary trends, other SkinnyTok content similarly blurs the line between wellness and aesthetic control. From calorie-counting vlogs to transformation videos set to trending audio, users construct narratives of self-improvement that hinge on bodily discipline. What begins as inspiration often morphs into obsession, particularly in the context of recovery communities or ‘wellness’ subcultures that repurpose disordered behaviours as aspirational routines.
Minadeo and Pope (2022) further demonstrate that weight-normative messaging predominates on TikTok, which “amplifies the message that health is synonymous with thinness.” Such content typically lacks diversity and nuance, rarely showing varied body types or eating habits. Even when alternative content exists, “these videos were often less visible or framed as exceptions” (Davis et al., 2023, p. 7). This invisibility reinforces a narrow vision of health, sidelining fat-positive, intuitive eating, or recovery-oriented content.
Furthermore, TikTok’s environment encourages the formation of identity through comparison. As Davis et al. (2023) argue, “participants engaged in the trend both to display their eating behaviours and to locate themselves within a wider social context—often comparing their intake to others’” (p. 5). The implications are particularly dire for impressionable youth. The dissonance between reality and the curated self exacerbates insecurities and may trigger or reinforce disordered eating behaviours. As Blackburn and Hogg (2024) note, “even seemingly benign ‘fitspiration’ content may have psychological consequences for viewers.”
Cultural and Health Implications in the Australian Context
The effects of TikTok’s SkinnyTok community are particularly significant for young Australian women, who already navigate a media landscape saturated with Western beauty ideals. The Australian context, shaped by neoliberal health discourses and diet culture, compounds the psychological risks associated with prolonged exposure to SkinnyTok. Davis et al. (2023) emphasise that “eating disorders and disordered eating behaviours are a public health concern, particularly among adolescents and young adults” (p. 1). In Australia, the accessibility of social media and the absence of robust digital literacy programs make young people especially vulnerable.
Further, TikTok’s structure offers limited control over content exposure compared to other platforms. Blackburn and Hogg (2024) note that “TikTok users therefore have less control over their homepage newsfeed compared to other social media platforms.” This lack of agency, combined with the platform’s addictive nature—“TikTok users report finding TikTok ‘addicting’, leading to more frequent and prolonged use” (Davis et al., 2023, p. 6)—means that users may be exposed to disordered content before they have the tools to evaluate it critically.
In Australia, where public health campaigns often emphasise weight loss as a measure of health, TikTok’s aestheticisation of thinness resonates with pre-existing cultural scripts.
For instance, campaigns like LiveLighter and Healthy Weight Week focus on obesity prevention, often using visual imagery that associates thinness with success and fatness with failure. Blackburn and Hogg (2024) argue that orthorexic behaviours, often depicted as wellness, mirror “neoliberal self-improvement culture, wherein the body is treated as a site of performance and transformation.” This ideology aligns seamlessly with the Australian cultural valorisation of fitness and personal responsibility.
Moreover, body surveillance and diet culture are embedded in everyday Australian life—from school health curriculums to influencer marketing on social media. When these values are echoed and amplified by TikTok’s algorithm, they contribute to a national health culture that privileges aesthetic conformity over well-being. Without sufficient media literacy interventions or platform regulation, young Australians may lack the critical tools needed to resist these pressures.
Yet, there are critical opportunities for intervention. Davis et al. (2023) propose that clinicians “should be (1) familiar with TikTok and the rapid presentation of content tailored to viewer interests and (2) aware of the prevalence of ED and body-related themes in #WhatIEatInADay on TikTok” (p. 6). Socratic questioning and media literacy initiatives can empower users to interrogate the content they consume. However, systemic solutions—such as platform regulation and algorithmic transparency—must also be considered. Policy frameworks should recognise the role of digital architecture in shaping health behaviours, and initiatives should fund culturally responsive media education programs aimed at adolescents.
Conclusion
TikTok’s affordances create persistent, immersive filter bubbles that enable the formation of digital communities like SkinnyTok, where disordered eating is glamorised and internalised. Drawing on the work of Hampton (2016), Hampton and Wellman (2018), Davis et al. (2023), Blackburn and Hogg (2024), and Minadeo and Pope (2022), this paper demonstrates that TikTok’s influence is not merely a reflection of existing cultural ideals but an active force in shaping them. For young Australian women, this influence is particularly potent due to local health discourses and the platform’s pervasive reach.
Moving forward, the implications of these findings extend beyond academic critique—they demand action. If TikTok’s design can foster communities that contribute to psychological harm, then platforms, policymakers, educators, and researchers must collaborate to mitigate these risks. This includes prioritising algorithmic transparency, mandating responsible content moderation practices, and embedding media literacy education across Australian school curricula. Additionally, public health messaging must shift away from weight-normative frameworks to embrace body diversity and holistic well-being.
Ultimately, TikTok serves as both a mirror and a magnifier—reflecting cultural ideals while intensifying their impact through digital architecture. Addressing the harms of SkinnyTok requires not only reactive measures but proactive efforts to reimagine digital communities as spaces for empowerment rather than self-surveillance. In navigating this post-Ozempic digital landscape, we must ask: when does freedom of expression become a vector for harm, and who bears the responsibility for shaping healthier digital futures?
References
Blackburn, M. R., & Hogg, R. C. (2024). #ForYou? the impact of pro-ana TikTok content on body image dissatisfaction and internalisation of societal beauty standards. PLoS One, 19(8). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0307597
Davis, H. A., Kells, M. R., Roske, C., Holzman, S., & Wildes, J. E. (2023). A reflexive thematic analysis of #WhatIEatInADay on TikTok. Eating Behaviors, 50, 101759. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eatbeh.2023.101759
Hampton, K. N. (2016). Persistent and pervasive community: New communication technologies and the future of community. American Behavioral Scientist, 61(1), 101–124. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764215601714
Hampton, K. N., & Wellman, B. (2018). Lost and saved… again: The moral panic about the loss of community takes hold of social media. Contemporary Sociology, 47(6), 643–651. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094306118805415
Minadeo, M., & Pope, L. (2022). Weight-normative messaging predominates on TikTok—A qualitative content analysis. PLoS One, 17(11). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267997
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