On Tiktok anorexia is (sadly) a show that can kill
In the last few days, something unheard of that is not in the least having the resonance it should have has occurred on Tiktok. A girl, whose name I avoid, is risking to lose her life because of anorexia, and constantly documents her situation on her profile, followed by over 500 thousand people. This is taking place under everyone’s eyes, without being able to understand what to do to prevent it.
However, it is not an isolated case. On the Chinese social social networks there are numerous profiles of girls, often minors, who exhibit their eating disorder. Anorexic girls who strive to eat live, because they share their attempt to get out of the disease with the public, and the followers comment, inciting and supporting them, or insulting them: they attend the show and are excited about it. Girls who movie as they are hospitalized, attached to a tube, risking life; They share all the information on their state of health, the progression of the disease, the fear of not making it, its even devastating aesthetic effects. And the followers look, as if she were not a real person, but it was a television program built artfully.
Tiktok is to be considered directly responsible
Tiktok’s responsibility should be underlined and indeed shouted, who does not censor these contents at all; And it does not do it because these profiles are very popular – we are talking about hundreds of thousands of followers and therefore interactions of all sorts. At present, however, it seems difficult that this responsibility be legally recognized. In France, after numerous cases of very young people whose illness has worsened (or has started) following exposure to content of this type, the collective Algos Victima was founded, which offers support for victims (thus defined on the official website, And I would say rightly) and their families in trying to obtain that social platforms are declared responsible for the damage caused to minors.
This is the great problem of social regulation, which we continue to postpone and ignore, while the situation worsens more and more. The correlation between vision of content and increasing DCA and problems with the body image is now proven, and psychologists and psychiatrists all over the world have launched the alarm already years ago. We already know the power of the mechanism of imitation since the times of the pro Ana forums, at the dawn of the internet: the girls exchanged advice on how to avoid eating, or vomiting immediately after, without being discovered by the parents, and they encouraged each other. With social networks this is amplified, because they are no longer a private, hidden place, but a showcase from which it can potentially see you all over the world.
This obviously favors the spectacularization of the disease, which is not a new thing: we are now used to the VIPs who filly filly. However, this is not just this: it is that the disease defines you, it gives you an identity, and above all thanks to the disease it becomes famous. How can you think that a person wants to heal – from a disorder from which it is already very difficult to want to take care – if that condition is what brings visibility, attention and perhaps earn? In fact, the unacceptable thing is that content of this type are allowed on the platform.
The parents of the girls are equally responsible
But there is another implication, when the girls are minors or just eighteen: the role of parents, who not only know about the activity of the daughters on social media, but encourage it, and often become directors. In some cases they are probably not aware of damaging the girl, but they think they help her; However, it is likely that the family of a child sick with eating disorder has been informed by doctors and psychologists of the danger of the use of social media. In short, it is difficult that until the end these parents are totally in good faith, unaware of the damage they cause. And in any case, what parent would he serenely witness a rain of ignoble and cruel comments on his daughter? If they were addressed to school, or in the gym, or anywhere else live, the reaction would be completely different: when we never consider normal to go to a sick person and tell you “will you last less than a month”?
And the users who interact are equally responsible
So what about the commentators? The circus that is set up around the lives of these girls is frightening, almost incredible. Bets start: how much will it resist in the clinic? Will he really start to eat? Will he take weight? Not only that: in the case of the girl I spoke at the beginning, they even circulate content that commemorate her as if she had already died: Rip, she didn’t make it. This is because it is not only the girl in question that accumulates followers and interactions through her illness: they are also dozens of other people, who make content on her, republish her videos, make the “reaction”, comment on the live evolution of his state of health. In short, a freak show of the digital era.
As we know, those who express perplexity or concern for the dangers of social networks are easily labeled as old, bigoted, even Luddist. It is difficult to start a serious campaign of information and reflection, because nobody wants to talk about it: too many are gaining from these situations, and too many are enjoying them as you can enjoy an entertainment product. Meanwhile, the lives of these girls will be defined forever by the disease, with the infinite problems that it also involves when it heals, and from the public humiliation to which they have unconsciously subjected; with the connivance of the internet people.