TikTok now blocks search outcomes for #SkinnyTok

TikTok not shows search outcomes for the hashtag #SkinnyTok. Critics who supported this block mentioned some movies with that label had been selling disordered consuming and different unhealthy or dangerous food regimen behaviors. We have reached out to TikTok for touch upon this growth.

France’s Minister of State for Digital Affairs Clara Chappaz was one of many politicians main the towards this explicit hashtag. She has been campaigning towards #SkinnyTok with each French and EU regulators since . “These movies selling excessive thinness are revolting and completely unacceptable,” Chappaz mentioned. “Digital instruments are marvellous when it comes to progress and freedom, however badly used they’ll shatter lives … the social networks can not escape their duty.”

Whereas blocking search outcomes for probably dangerous hashtags is a optimistic step, it solely locations hurdles within the path of people that wish to search out related movies. “Customers are savvy,” Cornell College professor Brooke Erin Duffy instructed The New York Occasions. “They know easy methods to work these platforms and easy methods to evade their content material moderation techniques.”

A block on one hashtag is simply the newest in TikTok’s piecemeal method towards content material that would encourage consuming problems. In 2020 it positioned that may “promote a destructive or dangerous physique picture,” similar to fasting apps and weight reduction dietary supplements. TikTok started a with the Nationwide Consuming Dysfunction Affiliation in 2021 to supply extra sources for customers with consuming problems. Later that yr, it additionally launched a brand new to the For You web page in an effort to cut back the affect of watching too many repeated clips on a destructive subject.