That’s probably the reality of an automated filter.
Online communities that promote self-harm are out there and they are making things worse. I’m less than convinced that blurring a few instagram images will do anything to make things better.
My point was that recognizing the effect of communities that promote a behaviour is not at all like blaming video games or rock music.
Promoting deadly self-destructive behaviour seems like it ought to be stopped. I just tried googling to find information about how to conceal anorexia but no matter what words I typed it in just kept giving me sites on symptoms, signs, and support. I type in instead “how to get away with starving yourself” and I get tips in the first page of search results (including one where “starve” is used as a colloquial substitute for “diet” as a seemingly mainstream message about weight loss, so there’s that to contend with). Obviously someone at google modified the algorithm to zone in on the word “anorexia” but I just have to use different words. This is difficult stuff to combat and I don’t know if we know how.
I think suicide and self-harm like cutting are very different categories of behaviour. In suicide if you can put someone off of it for an hour you’ll very often put them off of it for months or more. Most people who survive suicide attempts are glad they lived. I’m sure this sounds absurd to people who have never been suicidal or who have never worked with suicidal people, but I have no doubt at all that there are people who are alive decades later because the day they were going to jump off a bridge the weather was just too awful so they stayed home.
Cutting isn’t a one-time desperate act in the same way. For a person who already does it, a little inconvenience isn’t going to stop them.
fortunately (i guess) its a mix of actual sites/ blogs and articles about pro-anorexia being a thing-- didn’t see any resource sites, just click-bait articles
I don’t have twitter or instagram so I can’t tell you what those hashtags lead to
there is a link to a tumblr site (which I am not including because I don’t know the age of the blogger) that at first glance looks like it’s support for anorexia/ bulimia (like, eating disorders being a Bad Thing and here are coping mechanisms, body positivity etc)-- but all the pictures are scary underweight, the blogger’s own goal and the reblogged goals of others are scary thin (5’7" and 115lbs is concerning, 5’2" and 95 lbs, 4’ 10" and 86 lbs— ) And of course that tumblr site links to many others.
“35 reasons to be skinny”
skinnny-and-featherlike
looking tiny in a medium sweater
wearing messy buns and actually looking GOOD
dainty arms
wearing bikinis with no shame
crop topssss
thin wired glasses
being able to sit on someone’s lap
being someone’s thinspo
“have you lost weight?”
bralettes
thigh gaps
defined cheek bones
RIBCAGES
visible collarbones
getting hugged and being told that your bones are poking them
being proud of yourself
actually looking good in a mirror
never being told to shop in plus sizes
“that might be a little big on you… maybe try a smaller size?”
looking good in all the makeup
cute boys/girls will take an interest in you
you are the most amazing thing in every room
being able to put your hand around your arm
fitting both hands around your thighs
size 0
always being a success story
getting rid of your before pictures
people actually wanting to kiss you
never having low self-esteem because you are the env of everyone
never having chafing thighs
no gross sweating all the time
dainty thin fingers
looking good in sweatpants
taking cute pictures of your legs in the bath
“oh you’ve gotten so skinny! how did you do it? you look amazing!
That’s not a matter of “throwing more money at the problem” it’s a matter of “putting the problem under the control of an authoritarian corporate state”. Think about who Trump might appoint to run a “Great Firewall of the USA”.
I’d never heard of “thinspo” before. That one very neatly connects the dots between mainstream worship of thinness and eating disorders. (To save others thinspo is short for “thinspiration” a person who inspires you to be thinner by looking good being thin)
I’d love it if pinterest boards of this stuff didn’t exist. While I have experience with suicide and self-harm generally, I don’t know much about eating disorders and I wouldn’t guess how to tackle the problem. (Aside from generally promoting body positivity.)
You’re moving the goalposts and not understanding me. All I’m saying is - the narrative that content moderation is “impossible” is highly convenient to people who benefit financially from these business models. It would be possible to fully moderate Instagram, but doing so would probably require Instagram to charge subscriptions instead of being ad-powered and would mean its reach was substantially limited. Even if you think that would be bad and the status quo is great, the point is merely that the status quo is a choice.
My sister struggled with anorexia before tumblr and Instragram. All of the same elements appear to present, with the exception of the amplifying quality of social media.
This is a standard model/actor weight- I have seen pages listing the heights and weights of lingere models (VS, et. al), and while they were slightly taller, they were in the same range- 5’9, 119 lbs, and so on.
As long this narrow ideal of sexy and desirable dominates the imagery produced by the fashion and film industry, these groups aren’t going anywhere.
No, it was merely an illustration that such moderation and interception of selected/prescribed material is entirely possible.
Nobody was suggesting it be state-run.
Perhaps “the great firewall of Facebook/Instagram/wherever” is a better description, especially as the rest of us could remain as happily outside it as we currently are, if we chose.
ETA Oops I composed this a while ago but had not hit ‘post’ until now (being distracted by some real-world nonsense needing my urgent attention) and now I see you’d already replied above. Apologies. Though this does amplify the point and I guess we are now all on the same page.
Uh… I mean, maybe I’m wrong here, but as someone who has been in some pretty dark places, and who has known and cared for people who have attempted suicide, or caused intentional physical self harm as some means of psychological release, this smells an awful lot like bullshit.
All I’m saying is, I know several people who aren’t alive anymore because of self-induced reasons, and there’s no way in hell that simply “making it hard for people to find images of self harm” would have helped any of them–if anything, it would made it worse. People who physically harm themselves often do it from a place of hurt that is fed at least in part by feelings of isolation.
To put it another way, when dealing with a suicidal person who feels isolated and misunderstood, the last thing you want to do is apparently confirm those feelings. This is not advocacy for the “well, everybody feels like that sometimes!” response that is very common among well-meaning people, that’s a reaction that people have to someone experiencing something they don’t themselves fully understand and doesn’t really help. What I mean is creating a situation that makes people who already feel isolated, misunderstood, and/or alone feel even worse, and makes it even easier for them to justify the notion that things neither can, nor will, get any better.
No, this sounds like is what a bunch of tech industry cowards would do in order to try to keep things that aren’t “fun and marketable” off of their platform. These motherfuckers don’t care that girl is dead, all they care about is being somehow implicated in that death. That’s all any of these motherfuckers care about from the tech industry to health secretary–their own visibility. The platform is worried about being associated with something shocking and scary, and the health secretary needs to be seen to be “protecting children.” Since it’s literally impossible to blanketly “protect children” from suicide or self-harm, they’re both using basically the same strategy to put as much distance between themselves and the parts of reality that just seem to refuse to conform to their desires or expectations. You can be sure that on some level the people behind these decisions know damned well that they aren’t going to change anything, and that this postured ineffectiveness is just a cynical way to push the blame to literally anywhere else.
The massive surge in <20 suicide couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that so many young people feel like they never even had a future to begin with on account of their parents and grandparents taking literally everything that isn’t nailed down! They obviously got the idea by seeing pictures of people doing it on the internet, just like every generation before them!
Well, (and setting aside that these companies are global - but run by parochial USians) surely that’s just the American way:
Violence? Sure - as much as you want. Here, have a gun or three. Teach your toddlers. Dead bodies on the news at nine.
An accidental nipple for a split-second at half time in a football match? Cue mass hysteria and hand-wringing that a teenager might have seen it.
And
Completely correct. Like I said above - they only care when it threatens to become bad PR.
I am cynical about the latest noises in the UK (more ‘we must be SEEN to be doing something and taking it seriously’ rather than any actual urgent action) but I suppose it is possible we are at or near a tipping point, when government ministers start actively talking about legislation. But they’ve been talking for a while. I certainly hope something comes of it now, but any tipping that happens always takes a lot longer than one might hope, and tips a lot less further than is needed. Here’s hoping.
It seems to be what the UK government wants, too. Every threat of new legislation is accompanied by a technological hand-wave. “You’re clever people, I’m sure you’ll work it out”.
It’s the same with encryption. “I’m sure you boffins can work out how to provide secure end-to-end encryption that GCHQ can eavesdrop on. By the way, how’s that square circle coming along?”
Quite the contrary. Requiring all social media site to operate such a “great firewall” would be highly beneficial to the big social media companies’ dominance. Facebook can afford it, and it would massively increase the costs for anyone looking to start a rival social media site.
The tech co’s say they can solve $PROBLEM with $TECH and lobby governments to that effect; governments decide that $OTHER_PROBLEM caused by $OTHER_TECH can be solved by $YET_MORE_TECH - because they’ve been told for years that the answer is always $YET_MORE_TECH.
