June 4, 2025 - 10:00am
In a rare victory for content moderation, TikTok has banned the hashtag #SkinnyTok globally in response to pressure from the French government. The hashtag, which featured over 70,000 videos, boasted calorie-counting hacks, “thinspiration” videos, before-and-after body transformations, and mantras such as “last month’s diet is this month’s body”.
The President of the French digital regulator Arcom and France’s Digital Minister Clara Chappaz lobbied and met with TikTok officials, while the European Union continues a wider investigation into the app’s compliance with the Digital Services Act. However, Chappaz says that the “fight to protect our children doesn’t stop here”, adding: “Banning social media before 15 is my priority.”
Chappaz is right that we need to go further. Banning the hashtag is a sensible move, and anything that stops teenagers from being exposed to videos glorifying protruding ribs and emaciated thigh gaps should be applauded.
Yet it is a victory in principle rather than practice. Users are adept at getting around filters, and soon enough there will be another trend, another hashtag, another pro-anorexia influencer extolling the virtues of extreme diet and exercise. The app will continue to churn out thousands of videos that encourage users to fetishise or fear food, as even seemingly innocuous trends like #WhatIEatInADay (6.9 billion views) can lead to unrealistic expectations and disordered eating.
The links between social media content and eating disorders are well-documented, but they can also be oversimplified. Blaming a single cause for anorexia, whether that be TikTok or Vogue or supermodels, is both reductive and misleading, and it perpetuates the idea that it is a disease of vanity. As Hadley Freeman, who wrote Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia in 2023, argues: “Eating disorders are not — contrary to common misconceptions — about food. They are about anxiety, unhappiness and self-loathing.” Anorexia is “not a desire to look skinny, but a desire to look ill”.
If eating disorders are an articulation of unhappiness, then we should ask why so many young people are unhappy in the first place. In the UK, the number of older teenage girls with an eating disorder has risen to 20%, while a report by The Children’s Society found that British 15-year-old girls are the unhappiest in Europe. The rise in mental health problems across the Western world, particularly among girls, cannot be explained by a single hashtag or trend.
This obsession with diet culture is a symptom, not a cause, of the immense pressure young people find themselves under from spending their adolescence — a turbulent time at best — chronically online. These unhealthy behaviours are a manifestation of the unhappiness caused by social media: constant distraction, constant comparison, constant navel-gazing. Megan Nolan writes about how anorexia is a “solitary, self-constructed universe, defined by laws of deformed logic”— and yet one could easily say the exact same thing about social media.
Going after #SkinnyTok is an easy target, but occasional content moderation is not enough to give young people their childhood back. By removing the hashtag, TikTok has temporarily placated the EU, but achieved nothing more. This concession distracts from the fact that these algorithms are designed to amplify content which keeps you watching, for better or worse. We should be far more worried about the empty, insatiable hunger this is creating in us all.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe