Bones, body parts, and sex appeal: An analysis of #thinspiration images on popular social media

Objectifying fitness: A content and thematic analysis of #fitspiration images on social media.

“…That said, evidence of problematic media content is not evidence of negative media effects. Hence, future research should examine the specific impact of #fitspiration images and text on both men and women, particularly in light of previous findings whereby objectification has been found to be more gendered (Buysse & Embser-Herbert, 2004;Ghaznavi & Taylor, 2015). Future research would also benefit from an analysis of comments attached to #fitspiration content, as this may facilitate a much-needed understanding of how users interpret the hashtag.…”

“…First, data were collected from one social networking site (SNS) and the authors only examined the images labelled with one metadata tag, despite the numerous publically available SNS and hashtags variants. There may be subtle differences between posts labelled as #fitspiration on one site and others using various derivatives (e.g., #fitspo, #fitfam) or other SNS (as per Ghaznavi and Taylor, 2015 who found that some sites and hashtags were more associated with objectified imagery than others). It is also acknowledged that 1,000 #fitspiration posts cannot begin to represent the 1.4 billion images shared on a daily basis and as researchers, we must consider how we begin to capture and understand larger data sets.…”

The Relationship Between Body Image Concerns, Eating Disorders and Internet Use, Part I: A Review of Empirical Support

“…Pro-eating disorder content has also been found to be prevalent on social media, including Facebook (Teufel et al 2013). An analysis of social media content tagged as ''Thinspiration'' or ''Thinspo'' revealed that these images were generally highly objectifying, sexually suggestive, and frequently accompanied by endorsing comments (Ghaznavi and Taylor 2015).…”

“…From a developmental perspective, adolescence is an important time for self-objectification as it is hypothesized that the sexual objectification of girls' bodies increases sharply as they reach puberty, and that the physical changes resulting from puberty are accompanied by increasing self-objectification (Fredrickson and Roberts 1997). In addition, the access to sexually explicit online content might be associated with early sexual priming, which could increase self-objectification at an earlier age (Greenfield 2004) Objectification theory has been used to frame studies exploring online content such as ''thinspiration'' content on Twitter (Ghaznavi and Taylor 2015). In addition, objectification theory has been used in studies exploring the relationship between poor body image and the attention paid to photos of oneself shared online (Fox and Rooney 2015).…”

Health Behavior Change Theories in Physical Activity Pins on Pinterest: A Content Analysis

“…Previous studies have demonstrated associations between young women's body image concerns and their time spent on Facebook [37]. Ghaznavi and Taylor (2015) studied Twitter-and Pinterest-based images labeled with the hashtag "thinspiration" [38]. They concluded that frequent exposure to images of thin women makes women more likely to accept these images as a desirable reality.…”