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“Hunger Hurts but Starving Works”: Characterizing the Presentation of Eating Disorders Online

Published: 27 February 2016 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    Within the CSCW community, little has been done to systematically analyze online eating disorder (ED) user generated content. In this paper, we present the results of a cross-platform content analysis of ED-related posts. We analyze the way that hashtags are used in ad-hoc ED- focused networks and present a comprehensive corpus of ED-terminology that frequently accompanies ED activities online. We provide exemplars of the types of ED-related content found online. Through this characterization of activities, we draw attention to the increasingly important role that these platforms play and how they are used and misappropriated for negative health purposes. We also outline specific challenges associated with researching these types of networks online. CAUTION: This paper includes media that could potentially be a trigger to those dealing with an eating disorder or with other self-injury illnesses. Please use caution when reading, printing, or disseminating this paper.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CSCW '16: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing
    February 2016
    1866 pages
    ISBN:9781450335928
    DOI:10.1145/2818048
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 27 February 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. ED
    2. EDNOS
    3. Instagram
    4. OSFED
    5. Tumblr
    6. Twitter
    7. anorexia
    8. behavioral health
    9. bulimia
    10. bulimia nervosa
    11. content analysis
    12. eating disorder
    13. online communities
    14. self-harm
    15. self-injury
    16. social media
    17. social networking

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    CSCW '16: Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
    February 27 - March 2, 2016
    California, San Francisco, USA

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    CSCW '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 142 of 571 submissions, 25%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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