#thyghgapp: Instagram Content Moderation and Lexical Variation in Pro Eating Disorder Communities
Pro eating disorder (pro ED) communities on social media encourage the adoption and maintenance of disordered eating habits as acceptable alternative lifestyles rather than threats to health. In particular, the social networking site Instagram has reacted by banning searches on several pro ED tags and issuing content advisories on others. We pre sent the first large scale quantitative study investigating pro ED communities on Instagram in the aftermath of moderation our dataset contains 2.5M posts between 2011 and 2014. We find that the pro ED community has adopted non standard lexical variations of moderated tags to circumvent these restrictions. In fact, increasingly complex lexical variants have emerged over time. Communities that use lexical variants show increased participation and support of pro ED (15 30% Finally, the tags associated with content on these variants express more toxic, self harm, and vulnerable content. Despite Instagram's moderation strategies, pro ED communities are active and thriving. We discuss the effectiveness of content moderation as an intervention for communities of deviant behavior.
CSCW