Content moderation on Tumblr: Silencing the Pro-Eating Disorder Community

• In Event: Voice, Static, and Silence on Tumblr

Abstract

This paper asks how Tumblr’s commercial imperatives might limit the extent to which it can ‘give voice’ to certain users, such as those who post pro-eating disorder (pro-ED) content. In March 2012, the platform made an uncharacteristically public decision to moderate pro-ED posts (see Gillespie, 2015), sending a clear message that such users should not be given a voice on Tumblr. But content-moderation-conscious users have developed subtle signals to identify themselves as pro-ED to other bloggers, which include: using in-group language, requesting that users block rather than report their accounts, and explicitly disavowing a pro-ED identity in their profile biographies - e.g., ‘I’m not pro-anything’ - but posting content that could be labelled as such. This paper uses a dataset of 1000 posts from 50 profiles to show how users are reclaiming Tumblr as a pro-ED space, working against both the platform’s rules and Western society’s stigmatization of disordered eating and unruly female bodies.

Ysabel Gerrard, PhD is a Lecturer in Digital Media and Society in the Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield, UK. She is a former Intern at Microsoft Research New England and the current Young Scholars’ Representative for the ECREA Digital Culture and Communication Section. Ysabel also co-organizes the Data Power Conference. Her current research interests include: social media content moderation, feminized social media practices, and digital research methods.

Author

• Ysabel Gerrard, The University of Sheffield