The Toxicity of Tik Tok: Beauty Standards,

Body Image and Eating Disorder Culture

The viral app, Tik Tok, often does more harm than good.
May 9th, 2021
________________________

By Rosie Orzulak

Rosie Orzulak is a CAP 10 student at

Montgomery Blair High School.
______________________________

For many teenagers, their daily routine

consists of multiple breaks to scroll through the viral app, Tik tok. Tik tok is an app that
essentially offers users endless entertainment in the form of short videos that consist of
anything.

Tik tok utilizes an “algorithm'' in which they study each user’s activity and the
categories they express interest in, and customizes each “for you page” to tailor the
specific user. For example, if a user likes a lot of videos about sports, their “for you
page” will center around sports.

Tik Tok began as a harmless social media platform where people shared their talents
and interests. Unfortunately, a rise in toxicity has spewed throughout the app, where
users project insecurities onto each other, due to the unrealistic beauty standards and
self-deprecating themes normalized throughout the app.

The Plea For Validation

Throughout quarantine, Tik Tok has become a staple in many teenager’s lives to fill
time and offer quick entertainment. Tik Tok has a vast amount of influencers, often
around the ages of 16-30, that claim Tik Tok as their primary career, and have a big
following on the app.

Scrolling through the app, you’ll notice the most popular influencers all look relatively
the same. Skinny, toned, tan, clear skin, nice smile, more-often-than-not white (as Tik
Tok’s beauty algorithm favors people with eurocentric features). You’ll see these looks
on Tik Tok influencers such as Addison Rae and Charli D’amelio. This alone is toxic, as
the representation of big influencers of color on Tik Tok is low, reinforcing eurocentric
features as “the beauty standard”, since the influencer’s are essentially gaining fame off
of their appearance. The influencers all post relatively the same things, videos of them
in known places, dancing, smiling and posing.

Their followers then respond to these videos with likes and positive comments, hyping
the influencer up, essentially idolizing them. Although this all appears harmless, the
comment sections also consist of dozens of the same type of comments: Young girls or
teenagers commenting on the influencer's weight or physical appearance, bringing
themselves down in a plea for attention or validation. Most of these comments consist
of phrases like, “I shouldn't have eaten
today :(, “I wish I looked like this”,
“Why do I even exist” “My parents had
one job,” etc.

Sentences like these flood almost every comment section of influencers on Tik Tok,
which reveals such a big problem with the app. These comments are rooted from a place
of insecurity of the commenter, and they’re completely counterproductive. As I
mentioned, they’re a plea for attention and validation, disguised as a compliment to the
influencer. Teenage girls scroll through and read these comments several times a day.
So many toxic habits are formed when they end
up internalizing them, and most girls are
provoked to begin body-checking themselves.
The comments never offer anything positive to
anybody that sees it.

The Encouragement of Disordered eating and Unhealthy Mental Habits

Many of these comments center around embracing unhealthy behaviors, thoughts, and
eating disorders (ED), to achieve the same features as the influencers. As mentioned
before, these phrases include, “I shouldn't have eaten today”, “Why am I even alive”,
etc. These self-degrading comments pose a
risk to many people. You would think people
would be replying to the comments
discouraging the unhealthy behavior, but
instead the comment replies are full of people
agreeing with each other, further encouraging disorderly eating habits. Since the
comments are so normalized, the behaviors mentioned in the comments are
encouraged, as the comments barely carry any sort of negative connotation. Many
people engage in these behaviors after seeing these comments, to reach the beauty
standard further developed by viral trends on Tik Tok, and influencers as a whole.

Netflix’s documentary, ‘The Social Dilemma”(2020) goes into depth about the
implications of social media and issues related to social media. The documentary delves
into the decrease of mental health and the increase of anxiety among teens in the past
ten years due to social media. The title
of the documentary has to do with the
positive correlations between
widespread technology use, teenage
depression and suicide rates and their
implications that reflect a modern
“social dilemma.” The U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
recorded a dramatic increase in suicide
rates among youth aged 10–14, nearly
tripling from 2007 to 2017. In the
documentary, Jonathan Haidt, a social
psychologist at the NYU Stern School of Business, claims that “a whole generation is
more anxious, more fragile, [and] more depressed.” The U.S. CDC has found that the
number of children aged 6–17 years with a diagnosis of anxiety or depression increased
from 5.4% in 2003 to 8% in 2007 and to 8.4% in 2011–2012.

Ways to Help; The Concept of Body Neutrality

Although it seems like with social media everything is too far gone, there are still ways
we can slow down the rapid increase of toxicity and ED glorification toward younger
audiences. Certain influencers on tik tok have taken many approaches, including the
promotion of body neutrality, which is the philosophy where you fixate on what your
body can do f0r you, as opposed to what it looks like. This is inevitably positive because
it decentralizes the body as an object, challenging the myth that the way you look drives
your worth. Achieving this mindset as a society is incredibly difficult, but in the end it
would be beyond worth it.

More information on body neutrality-

https://www.healthline.com/health/body-neutrality