The purpose of my research was to examine if the body positivity movement on Tik Tok had an effect on how women and adolescent girls view their bodies. This is an important research topic as many struggle with their body image and I wanted to see if Tik Tok had a direct influence on how people viewed their own bodies. To analyze this question, the methods I used consisted of conducting a content analysis at the public’s perception through their comments on Tik Tok. I selected ten influencers whom I felt supported the body positive movement and examined two to three videos from each influencer. From those posts I viewed the top fifty comments from the public and coded for positive and negative comments about commenters or the influencers’ body image. The most prominent finding from my research showed that influencers with larger/ more average body types were often viewed as more empowering and confident while the influencers with a thinner body produced more envious and jealous responses.
Social media has had a drastic effect on body image and how people perceive themselves and others. Bodies used to be a part of a much more private conversation, but with the advancements of social media body image has become a much more public discussion (Andersson, Goodyear, Quennerstedt and Varea 2022). This can be seen in all of the Tik Tok comments that talk about body image openly and publicly on these different influencers’ posts. Eating habits and healthy lifestyles were also discussed frequently among influencers with heavier and thinner body types. Evaluating how body image and eating disorders are interconnected in young adolescent girls was important to my research, as this age group is the most susceptible to developing eating disorders due to society’s unrealistic body standards and the pressures of social media (Bravender: 2021). However, I did not find any significant correlation between increased eating disorders and body image on Tik Tok. Mental health was also another topic I wanted to further examine as using social media can be associated with problems such as anxiety, depression, loneliness, poor sleep quality, poor mental health indicators, thoughts of self-harm and suicide, increased levels of psychological distress, cyberbullying, body image dissatisfaction, fear of missing out (FoMO) and decreased life satisfaction (Hassan and Tatari 2021). Mental health is an important topic to research along with body image and social media usage but within my research there were few comments from the public that discussed mental health.
For future research, I think it is important to evaluate these three related topics, body image, disorders eating and mental health, through a different social media platform. While Tik Tik does promote a lot of conversation about body image, mostly comments discuss peoples’ feelings towards their own bodies or the influencers’. This leaves crucial details out about other factors such as histories of eating disorders or mental health problems. It would be beneficial to research these topics by not only looking at Tik Tok comments or the influencers opinion; such an analysis does not give enough insight into how people really perceive body image along with other factors such as eating, exercising and mental health. Future researchers could therefore conduct surveys’, interviews or focus groups to delve further into these very personal issues.