“What makes a pro eating disorder hashtag”: Using hashtags to identify pro eating disorder tumblr posts and Twitter users

摘要

Eating disorders are detrimental to emotional and physical health conditions. The proliferation of content promoting eating disorders (pro-ED) on social media is a concerning trend that has received attention in recent years. On popular social network websites such as Tumblr and Twitter, there exist online pro-ED communities that focus on having eating disorder as a lifestyle choice as opposed to psychiatric illness. In this paper, we used hashtags to develop two well-trained classifiers: one identifies pro-ED Tumbler posts, and the other identifies pro-ED Twitter users. We also compared pro-ED hashtags across these two networks.