By Isabelle Anderson
Like every teenage girl confined to their home during this pandemic, I have spent copious hours on the famed social media platform Tik Tok. If you’ve been living under a rock for the past year and haven’t heard of Tik Tok, it’s a social media app where people, mostly teenagers, share comedy, dancing and lip synching videos to the public. Most of these videos are light hearted or comedic in nature, but recently the platform has experienced an increase in content related to body dysmorphia, eating disorders and low body confidence. From videos promoting disordered eating behaviors to individuals commenting that they “weren’t hungry anyways” under a small framed girls video, the platform has become a breeding ground for unhealthy ideas about weight and body image.
I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t also experience these thoughts. The most popular social media stars are all tall, thin, and portrayed to be this unattainable perfection, which only makes them more alluring. The Tik Tok algorithm capitalizes on this. Back in 2019, Tik Tok admitted to suppressing videos by disabled, queer, or big bodied creators and promoting videos of people they deemed attractive. Basically anyone who didn't fit the traditional standard of beauty became censored. This isn’t uncommon among social media platforms, but it seems to resonate differently among Tik Tok users.
I believe this is because Tik Tok markets itself as a platform for normal people. It’s not celebrities with full makeup teams, or hours of editing and photoshop. It is just a person and their iPhone camera, and still, young adults and teenagers are left feeling inadequate. The Tik Tok algorithm crafted what they believed to be beautiful and made it the viewer normal, deeply damaging the self image of its users. Tik Tok’s community guidelines state that any bullying or harassment is not tolerated on their platform. Yet, it is their executive team that decides how big is too big, how short is too short and how many imperfections are too many. It's hypocritical and only encourages the idea that all bodies are beautiful, fueling the bullying they claim to be against.
Social media in its simplest form is a controlled environment to showcase the best parts of one’s life, and somehow this remains extremely undiscussed. The internet is amazing in its capabilities but also exposes us to a vulnerability that did not exist before its invention. Beauty is defined by so much more than a 30 second video clip, and while we all understand that- I think younger communities online have a harder time internalizing it, especially when the platform itself is only promoting one form of beauty.
This being said will I stop using Tik Tok, no probably not. But I think it is a conversation that needs to be had, and that people with a platform should use it to combat these ideas. So next time you’re scrolling and see someone who makes you insecure, just remember that anything can be edited, and everyone is beautiful.
P.S here’s my favorite Tik Tok atm.
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