Meta under the microscope on eating disorders

Varsha Yajman can tell if she’s on the brink of an eating disorder relapse just from her Instagram feed. Experts fear a rise in online communities devoted to unhealthy dieting.

Sydney University student Varsha Yajman dealt with an eating disorder through high school and lockdown. Picture: Jane Dempster

Facebook and Instagram are putting the onus on eating disorder survivors to avoid content that can trigger their anorexia and bulimia, with their attempts to crack down on unhealthy posts failing, experts and advocates warn.

Meta has sought to limit harmful diet posts, introducing in 2021 a reform that would direct users towards relevant helplines when accessing content that may be deemed harmful. In January the site began placing all teenage users into its most restrictive content settings by default.

However, the volume of content and the lucrative market that social media provides to diet culture has kept it prevalent online, as even material made to document recovery carries its own pitfalls.

Varsha Yajman struggled with an eating disorder through high school, but found it hard to identify with the predominantly white eating disorder victims she saw in media and online.

“Social media had its good moments. and it also had its really bad moments,” she said. “Since I didn’t really have anyone I could necessarily go to and get validation from, I went to the internet.

“I thought ‘there are people who are struggling with an eating disorder here making videos about recovery’ … but then a lot of it would also be labelled as recovery content, and it would actually just be the exact opposite. It would be people who were in the depths of their eating disorder doing a lot of body checking or restricting really heavily.”

She warned that eating disorder promotion had effectively entered into “wellness” communities online.

“Even now, I know that if I’m going through a relapse or on the brink of one, the content that I’m seeing will be more harmful than positive,” Ms Yajman said.

“The really frustrating thing is they put the onus on you to do something about it, and when somebody is already struggling with mental health, it’s so unfair to then be demanding that.

“It’s like asking somebody with a broken leg to run a kilometre.”

Ms Yajman, 21, now studies law and arts at the University of ­Sydney, and works as a youth mental health advocate and ­paralegal.

Butterfly Foundation communications head Melissa Wilton.

Independent MP Zoe Daniel. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Meta in recent weeks has struck out against the Australian government and regulators. Following reports the platform has promoted almost 100,000 scams in the past six months, and shut down the analytics tool used to assess biased material, Meta’s regulatory capacity has been called into question.

The mortality rate for those with eating disorders is up to 12 times higher than the general population, according to the Butterfly Foundation.

“There’s a lot more scrutiny around the content that’s available on social media now than … in the very early days, but there’s also an incredible increase in the amount of content that’s available,” Butterfly Foundation head of communications Melissa Wilton said.

“It means there’s by default more problematic content creators and more content that is unhelpful or even dangerous.”

Independent MP Zoe Daniel held a social media and body image roundtable in September that brought parliamentarians and industry experts face to face with victims of eating disorder and led to the establishment of a ­working group to determine the most effective ways to combat harmful content, including considerations of reform to the Online Safety Act.

The group has four areas of reform focus: legislation, lived experience, research and analysis, and program interventions.

“This work is vitally important. Anorexia has the highest death rate of any mental illness. I ­promised I would fight for families experiencing this cruel and relentless illness. Making social media safer is a big part of it,” Ms Daniel said.

Monash University Body Image and Eating Disorders Research Centre head Gemma Sharp also warned of the dangers recovery content can present.

“Recovery is a journey, it’s not a state,” Dr Sharp said. “Sometimes people will just say ‘I’ve recovered because my weight has restored’, but really, their thinking is still very eating-disordered.

“I don’t think any platforms went out of their way to harm people … it was just that these communities found a home because, generally speaking, people with eating disorders can be very isolated. Their eating disorder can take over their whole life … to find such an easy community was just convenient. They just converged online.”

Monash University Body Image and Eating Disorders Research Centre head Gemma Sharp. Picture: Ben Searcy

A 2023 University of Melbourne study found vulnerable users were far more likely to be provided with videos that promoted dieting on TikTok. Users with eating disorders were 225 per cent more likely to see appearance-related videos on their social media feed than users without.

Their exposure to eating disorder-related videos was almost 40 times higher than the average.

Meta emphasised it was the only social media body to attend the parliamentary roundtable.

The Butterfly Foundation provides a national eating disorder hotline at 1800 ED HOPE.