Thinspo Controversy Continues on Social Media

Thinspo Controversy Continues on Social Media

Of late Instagram has apparently become a new home for the thinspo ana community after the Tumblr and Pinterest banning. Pictures can be privately uploaded via phone apps and sent out without any intrusive or pesky, parental watching or eyeball glossing by administrators of sites intimidated by anti anorexia advocacy groups looking to pull down particularly egregious photos of bags of bones with skin stretched like thin rubber over hard protrusions.

Why have the bony ones floated light as a feather to Instagram? Unlike Pinterest and Tumblr user agreements, Instagram community guidelines indicate that such self harm photos are technically OK with these statements: that our community is a diverse one, and that your photos are visible to people as young as 13 years old. While we respect the artistic integrity of photos, we have to keep our product and the photos within it in line with our App Store rating for nudity and mature content. In other words, please do not post nudity or mature content of any kind. is no ban; just a reminder of what they deem respectable and decent for the PG 13 crowd.

Pinterest and Tumblr have gone much farther in their user guidelines and address photos which could be construed as glorifying self destructive behaviors like anorexia, bulimia, cutting, suicide, and encouraging mental, physical, emotional distress or disability, sadism and/or other forms of torture and violence. So if their ana (anorexic) thinspiration, business is flying elsewhere, Instagram appears to be the convenient place to pick up any thinspo slack at the moment.

However, have you checked the Pinterest and Tumblr links above? You will notice that the sites still have thinspiration pictures pinned and posted to them. Even if some of the pins were taken down, others will be put up just as quickly. In fact the ban announcement may have worked in the reverse; a controversy of pro and con advocacy is now brewing on Pinterest with pins of posters with commentary both supportive and critical of the ban. But that is to be expected, is it not? This movement is deeply entrenched and though the announcement may have the effect of reverse psychology, Pinterest and Tumblr are covering themselves to mitigate liability with their updated user agreements. If anyone attempts litigation, administrators will surely point out that such social media sites are nearly impossible to monitor; joining user numbers exceed into the thousands daily and such pins continue unabated because they proliferate and some are hard to locate.