Whenever the subject of social media and teenagers comes up, it seems someone wants to talk about eating disorders. Conventional wisdom says Instagram and other highly visual platforms promote negative body image and push young people—mostly young women—to take dieting to extremes. Some politicians even want to hold tech companies legally liable when young users develop eating disorders.
Suggestions like these make me want to bang my head against a wall. They represent a dreadful misread of both eating disorders and technology, as well as the limits of content moderation and the functions of eating disorder communities and content.
I’m reminded of all of this because of this excellent post at Techdirt by TechFreedom legal fellow Santana Boulton. “Eating disorders are older than social media, and advocates who think platforms can moderate [eating disorder] content out of existence understand neither eating disorders nor content moderation,” she writes.
Eating Disorders and the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)
The big reason we’re discussing this issue right now is KOSA, the latest (and arguably most likely to succeed) effort in Congress to childproof the internet. KOSA was first introduced in 2022 and a new version is back this year. It comes from Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.), one of the…
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