The next speaker at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Christina Haag, whose focus is on social media exposure and adolescent body satisfaction. Social media use by young people has been a significant field of debate in recent times, with several countries attempting to introduce social media bans for young people; this study explores what kind of material young people actually see, such as beauty videos on TikTok.
The study explores whether extensive exposure to beauty videos amongst female adolescents affects end-of-day body satisfaction. But how can we measure such exposure? Approaches here might include counting the seconds for which thin, sexualised female bodies are shown on screen; identifying from the video metadata whether a beauty filter was applied to the videos; and determining whether videos are internally labelled as beauty content by TikTok itself.
This was operationalised in a longitudinal daily-life study which also asked participants about their body satisfaction; it showed a wide range of usage patterns from no use on some days to extensive use over several hours on others. Content experienced was processed using a computer vision pipeline that identified gender, thinness, revealing clothing, and any kind of posing in the videos consumed; the number of seconds of exposure to such content were also assessed. Explicitly sexualised posing could not be reliably identified.
Ultimately, from all this, there was no statistically significant effect from exposure to such content: only a tiny percentage of all users saw an excessive amount of such content, and effects from watching it differed widely amongst the participants. Body image is likely to be evolving over much longer timeframes than claims of direct and strong effects from exposure suggest.
