#SkinnyTok rebranded eating disorders dangerously fast

Today's social media landscape makes it easy for creators to disguise disordered eating as a "healthy" part of life

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NEW YORK - #SkinnyTok is dead. Or at least that is what TikTok wants you to believe after its recent ban of the hashtag promoting an extreme thin ideal.

That might have appeased regulators, but it should not satisfy parents of teens on the app. An army of influencers is keeping the trend alive, putting vulnerable young people in harm's way.

Today's social media landscape makes it all too easy for creators to repackage and disguise disordered eating as a "healthy" part of everyday life.

That lifestyle then gets monetized on various platforms - via habit trackers, group chats and 30-day aspirational challenges - and shared with a much broader audience.

The rise of #SkinnyTok is, in many ways, a rehashing of the pro-eating disorder content of the past.

In the mid-1990s, it was British supermodel Kate Moss and "heroin chic." Then came the Tumblr posts in the early aughts praising "Ana" and "Mia," fictional characters that stood for anorexia and bulimia.

Now, it is 23-year-old influencer Liv Schmidt telling her followers to "eat wise, drop a size."

Ms Schmidt, a prominent #SkinnyTok influencer who is often credited with lopping the "y" off of "skinny" and replacing it with an "i," is the founder of the members-only group Skinni Societe. In September 2024, she was banned from TikTok amid scrutiny by The Wall Street Journal.

RESURGENCE OF PROBLEMATIC CONTENT

The fact that she continues to make headlines some nine months later drives home the perpetual game of whack-a-mole that regulators are playing with problematic content.

After her TikTok ban, Ms Schmidt simply moved her audience over to Instagram, where her followers have grown from 67,000 to more than 320,000.

Until recently, she was charging people US$20 (S$26) a month for a "motivational" group chat, but when New York magazine The Cut found at least a dozen of those users were in high school, Meta demonetized her profile in May.