"This post will just get taken down": Characterizing removed pro-eating disorder Social media content

Stevie Chancellor, Zhiyuan Lin, Munmun De Choudhury

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

63 Scopus citations

Abstract

Social media sites like Facebook and Instagram remove content that is against community guidelines or is perceived to be deviant behavior. Users also delete their own content that they feel is not appropriate within personal or community norms. In this paper, we examine characteristics of over 30,000 proeating disorder (pro-ED) posts that were at one point public on Instagram but have since been removed. Our work shows that straightforward signals can be found in deleted content that distinguish them from other posts, and that the implications of such classification are immense. We build a classifier that compares public pro-ED posts with this removed content that achieves moderate accuracy of 69%. We also analyze the characteristics in content in each of these post categories and find that removed content reflects more dangerous actions, self-harm tendencies, and vulnerability than posts that remain public. Our work provides early insights into content removal in a sensitive community and addresses the future research implications of the findings.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCHI 2016 - Proceedings, 34th Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages1157-1162
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9781450333627
DOIs
StatePublished - May 7 2016
Externally publishedYes
Event34th Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2016 - San Jose, United States
Duration: May 7 2016May 12 2016

Publication series

NameConference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings

Other

Other34th Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Jose
Period5/7/165/12/16

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 ACM.

Keywords

  • Content removal
  • Deviant behavior
  • Eating disorders
  • Health
  • Social media

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