Abstract

The rise in eating disorders, a dangerous mental health condition with high mortality and morbidity, has been linked to the proliferation of idealized body images on social media. However, the link between social media and eating disorders is far more complex. We argue that social media platforms create a feedback loop that amplifies the growth of content and communities that promote eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia. Specifically, social media platforms make it easy for vulnerable individuals to find and connect to like-minded others, while group dynamic processes encourage them to stay engaged within communities that promote and glorify harmful behaviors linked to eating disorders. We characterize this dynamic empirically through a combination of network and language analysis. We describe a novel framework that leverages large language models to analyze the discourse within online …

Metadata

publication

arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.09647, 2024

year

2024

publication date

2024/1

authors

Minh Duc Chu, Aryan Karnati, Zihao He, Kristina Lerman

link

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024arXiv240109647C/abstract

journal

arXiv e-prints

pages

arXiv: 2401.09647