Hack’s Latest Investigation Proves The Importance Of Letting Young People Tell Their Own Stories

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the number of people seeking help for body image concerns and eating disorders has dramatically increased. The Butterfly Foundation links the uptick to the stressful news cycle and, perhaps more significantly, a higher exposure to weight-based stigma on social media.

Aware of these facts, triple j’s Hack decided to launch a crowd-sourced investigation to find out just how bad social media can be for people with body image issues and eating disorders.

“We knew this was an issue, and there’s been some reporting around this, but we didn’t really know the extent of it,” Hack’s host Avani Dias told Junkee. “And we certainly did not know the extent to which TikTok especially is affecting young Australians.”

This investigation, coming at a time when young Australians feel more ignored than ever, has once again proven the importance of asking people to tell their own stories.

Understanding The True Power Of TikTok

TikTok gained nearly half a million Australian users in the first half of 2020, and by the end of the year had about 2.5 million. The app’s Australian user base is primarily made up of young people, with about 70 percent of local users born after 1991.

Hack received more than 1200 responses as part of this investigation and found that the majority of respondents felt social media negatively affected how they felt about their body, weight, and how they eat.

“And once you’re down that dangerous path, it’s pretty hard to get out.”

When it came to TikTok in particular, Dias found TikTok was sending people down dark rabbit holes. “[They] start as something really innocuous — entertaining fun dances and so on — but the more you stay on the app, and the more it thinks you are someone who may have an eating disorder or want to see content about unhealthy weight loss, the more frequently you get shown that content,” said Dias. “And once you’re down that dangerous path, it’s pretty hard to get out.”

Dias said the Hack team spoke to young people who had been so negatively affected by TikTok content that they developed an eating disorder after joining the app. Other young Australians interviewed decided to seek mental health care or get off the app entirely.

Investigating One App’s Influence

These conversations led Dias and the Hack team to partner with ABC’s Four Corners. What began as an investigation into body image and eating disorders on social media helped them uncover other concerning aspects of TikTok’s algorithm.

“It’s not just eating disorders that people are getting sucked into. There are massive questions about whether the app is doing enough to deal with dark and disturbing content, to do with suicide for example,” said Dias. “On the flip side, TikTok is also discriminating against people of colour and censoring political content.”

Dias spent a lot of time on the app, gaming her own algorithm, looking for eating disorder content, conspiracy theory content, and more.

“It’s not hard to search for this stuff, and I would end up finishing the day looking at pretty full-on content, thinking what that kind of content could do to a young person.”

Asking Young People What’s Going On In Their World

In 2019, a triple j survey revealed a pretty big difference between how men and women experienced dating apps, with women sharing distressing stories of being held hostage, being sexually assaulted by someone they met on an app, and more.

Realising that no Australian universities or institutions had done extensive research into this, Hack decided to launch their first crowdsourced investigation, alongside Four Corners.

“There was a really big revelation we would not have found without being able to speak to young people came forward because we didn’t even know it was a problem.”

And that problem was the ‘unmatch’ function. The function was designed to give people power to essentially block someone from talking to you, but Hack found it was also working in the favour of perpetrators of sexual crimes.

“When you unmatch someone, what that does is delete you past chat histories with that person. So, a survivor of sexual assault will look at the app after it’s happened to get their name and get evidence that they’ve even spoken to each other, and they see that this person has actually unmatched them.”

These findings made a tangible difference. After the story came out, Bumble changed the unmatch function, so you could still get your chat history with a person. Tinder’s parent group, which also houses Hinge, also made some changes to their product and went into talks with the NSW Police Department on how to make the apps safer.

“Tinder is yet to change the unmatch function but they say you can contact the company to get it, which we found — again through crowdsourcing — is a really difficult process,” said Dias.

Voiceless In A Global Pandemic

According to a survey by the Foundation for Young Australians, throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, coverage of issues relevant to young people often contained stereotypes and unsubstantiated generalisations, and rarely quoted Gen Z or made use of case studies.

When it comes to young audiences, who are either disenfranchised or simply ignored, the crowd-sourced reporting provides a way for them to feel empowered to make real change.

As Dias put it, “You always go in with a bit on inkling of what you want to find, but you’re always quite surprised by how prevalent these issues seem to be”.

However, just as when dealing with sensitive subject matter in a more traditional investigative pieces, there’s a duty of care to the people who are sharing their stories.

“I think a big part of doing crowd-sourced journalism is that we do have a responsibility to look after our audience, give them the support they need, and make sure we are providing care for these people and not triggering them. We also want to make sure that people aren’t just giving us their stories and that’s that,” said Dias.

“We are eternally thankful to everyone that has come forward.”

You can watch the investigation on Four Corners tonight at 8.30pm AEST on the ABC.

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Rashna is a producer, writer, and DJ living in Naarm/Melbourne.