Abstract
The research seeks to identify the impacts that social media consumption among American teenage girls has on their mental and physical health. The major focus of the research is to determine the impacts that body positivity trends on TikTok have had on the identity of teenage girls. Many girls rely on the media’s projections of beauty as the ideal standard and go to unimaginable lengths to attain the standards. Those who cannot keep up are only left with a lowered self-esteem and lack of true identity. That affects their mental and physical health. The possible regulatory mechanisms for misleading TikTok content will be highlighted. The main strategy identified by the paper is to regulate media accessibility among underage girls.
Introduction
Technology has become a critical part of our lives. People heavily rely on different digital platforms to share and gather information. Businesses have also realized the huge digital resources and embarked on digital models of marketing. All that has been factored by the continued digital consumption culture, where the majority of information is shared over the internet. The growth of the digital space has come with its highs and lows. Many people have abandoned the original models of interaction and shifted to virtual interactions with the community of online friends. With the internet being an unregulated space, many people have utilized the platform to share their negative opinions about others. Cyberbullying is a common social challenge facing contemporary society. Taylor et al. (2023) state that the impact of social media content has been key in the creation of the identity of many people. People identify the groups that resonate with their ideas and abide by their standard provisions. Women have been at the forefront of experiencing the wrath of negative social media content. We are living in a world where women, majorly those in media space, are heavily sexualized, and how they look plays a significant role in stamping their social identity (Davis, 2002). Social pressures have forced women and young girls to go to unimaginable lengths in efforts to maintain an appealing body. The paper will seek to identify the media impacts on young young’s mental and physical health. The focus will be on the impacts of body positivity trends on TikTok and how they shape their identity and well-being.
Research Background
TikTok is a highly prominent social media interaction tool. A report by Vogels et al. (2022) highlights that 58% of global teens visit the TikTok digital platform daily. They do so to watch the variety of video content that aligns with their identity and entertainment needs. With the prominence of the media platform, brands have identified a unique platform through which they can advertise their products and tap into a large audience. The beauty and cosmetic products industry has been one of the booming 21 century industries (Lopaciuk & Loboda, 2019). Women are increasingly becoming aware of their bodies and strive to look their best. Beauty products utilize the images of sexy female characters and portray them as the universal standard for beauty. That has placed teen girls as perfect preys who do whatever is necessary to maintain their bodies to match the beauty standards portrayed over the internet. Many girls go to unimaginable lengths in dieting and use skin toning products, all in the name of acquiring the set beauty standards over the internet (Kite & Kite, 2020). TikTok has been a key platform where girls rely on social validation and identity. The research focuses on highlighting how the body positivity trends on TikTok affect the mental and physical health of female teenagers.
Research Significance
Mental health is a significant challenge facing the youth today. With the world becoming a global village, many young people have been exposed to many confusing ideas and cultures that disrupt their normal way of growing up. They are left with the dilemma of knowing the way of life to follow as their ideal lifestyle (Reaside et al., 2022). Also, whenever it becomes difficult to attain a certain lifestyle, many youths are left stressed, and their self-esteem drop. For instance, the media portrays the white woman as the ultimate standard for feminine beauty. With the fact being heavily stressed on different social media platforms, it becomes a major challenge for black girls who believe that they are not beautiful. To earn their identity, many black girls strive to use skin-toning products just to get close to being identified as beautiful (Thomas et al., 2011). Those who do not succeed in the toning process are left with stress and mental health challenges.
The research seeks to desensitize the negative impacts of social media consumption among the female youth. There is a need for society to observe the balance between the interests of corporate brands and the welfare of the people. Social media has been made a market platform where every content is geared towards making the viewer stick more. That has gone to the extent of creating false identity factors just to have more people yearning for the body and beauty content. The research will act as a social sensitization tool against the consumption of harmful social media content among the youth. The focus will be on the impacts that body positivity tiktok trends have affected the mental and physical health of teenage girls. With the identification of the social media consumption menace, there will be hope for the necessary policy organs to come up with better policies that safeguard teenage social media users from harmful and misleading content.
Research Objectives
The research will be focused on achieving the following objectives:
- Highlight the impacts of body positivity tiktok trends on the mental and physical welfare of teenage girl consumers
- Identify the possible regulatory mechanisms that cushion tiktok users from misleading content
- Sensitize the world on the unseen dangers of unregulated media content
Methodology
The methodology section outlines the key steps that will be followed in the entire research process. It seeks to confirm the validity of the data utilized in informing the research findings. When scientific methods of data collection are utilized, there is a general confidence in the reliance on the research findings.
Research Design
The primary design of the research will be qualitative. That is because the research relied on the qualitative opinion of the selected respondents. The researchers’ deductive capacity will play a key role in outlining the key findings of the research.
Data Collection Tool
Since the data used in the research was qualitative, questionnaires were utilized as the primary data collection tool. A combination of qualitative and quantitative questions was utilized since it enabled me to gather the necessary spread of information to be gathered. For instance, “To what extent have you felt pressured to have a certain body figure?” along with a Likert scale, alongside “Who do you feel the Body Positivity Movement and body-related content is geared towards online?”. Every question in the survey was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) and had been influenced by previous research. No questions were directly derived since I was unable to find any research specifically relating to the influence of The Body Positivity Movement. Mostly, I instead utilized the claims made by movement leaders as a reference point for questions. Five of the questions included focused on mental health effects the teenagers were experiencing in regard to their body image.
Five other questions worked to establish the teenager’s perspectives on the Body Positivity Movement and various body compositions. For instance, one of these questions asked respondents to establish if being overweight or underweight is worse for their health. 61.1% would answer being overweight to this. Three other questions were inspired by a study done by the British Parliament, specifically the M.P.s on the House of Commons Women and Equalities Select Committee, which had been completed in 2020. The study, named “ Changing the Perfect Picture: An Inquiry into Body Image”, worked to unravel the outside influences of media on the Body Images of the British population (Women and Equalities Committee, 2021). Similar to the Parliament study, the purpose of including these questions was to understand how respondents’ Body Image was being affected by what they were ingesting through social media.
Respondent Sampling Method
All prior research in this study placed a focus on the physiological effects of this shift in social media. To appease the physical aspects of my research question, “How have new body positivity trends being spread by TikTok affected female adolescents (ages 14-18), mental and physical health?”. I randomly selected a group of ten female adolescents (again utilizing School ID Numbers and a random number generator) for a five-question interview. Due to the sensitive content and the monotonous nature of survey responses, interviews were decided to be the best format to achieve the strongest results. Similar to the survey, the definitions of Body Image and The Body Positivity Movement were provided to respondents, allowing them a basis of knowledge to work with.
Adults were selected at random, utilizing room numbers and a random number generator. The purpose of this additional survey was to create a type of control group since they had grown up without TikTok and similar social media applications. In the final free-response question of the survey, adults were asked, “What type of impact, if any, has body-related content that you were exposed to as a child affected your body image?” This question would prove to be one of the most useful from the survey, as respondents provided details from their children. From this, I was able to derive that familial pressures, along with television, were the major driving factors in the dissatisfaction with body image.
Literature Review
Cultural exchange is a major social phenomenon facing contemporary society. With the exchange of cultures made easy by social media, many people are slowly losing their identity and aligning with new cultural beliefs (Goldman et al., 2008). The major challenge has been the incorporation of new cultural attributes into another contrary culture. For instance, the Westernized idea of gayism has been a challenge in many African countries (Chitando & Mateyeke, 2017). The liberty of western society is not the same as that of the African culture. Therefore, a gay individual in a society that opposes same-sex engagement may face more social and mental health challenges than one in western society.
TikTok has been a crucial platform for the success of the beauty and fashion industry. The platform houses a number of prominent fashion events and engages in the promotion of beauty and fashion products. That may be viewed as an innocent move for a fashion brand to market its products to a larger internet audience. However, the practice has major impacts on consumers that have never been imagined. The film Social Dilemma introduces us to the world of social media and the strategies that are utilized to keep users more glued to the screens (Orlowski, 2020). The platforms use secret logarithms that bank on the unique interests of the users to target the users. The more they get used to the content, the more they learn to rely on the platform for their own identity. The like and comment features are utilized as tools for strengthening the engagement aspect of the users with the media platforms.
TikTok has risen as one of the most preferable digital interaction platforms among the youth. Vogels et al. (2022) highlight that 58% of American teenagers visit the website every day. The statistics are way too high than Instagram and Snapchat, which have become increasingly popular among the American youth. With Tiktok recording more than 1 billion active users, it opens its users to a large of of interaction where individuals get to share their personal and cultural experiences. With the increasing reliance on TikTok by the majority of the Gen Z population, there has been a need to identify the unique impacts that the platform has on their reasoning and emotional conditioning.
Gender identity has been a key topic among 21st-century women. With the gender sensitization movements being on the rise, more and more women differ in their true identity. Traditional society has historically placed women in positions of inferiority where they struggle to find their position in social and economic space (Lugones, 2007). Gender equality has been an ongoing debate that has seen the improvement of the social and economic opportunities among women from different parts of the globe. Gender-oppressive practices like FGM and early marriages have been heavily condemned. That has paved the way for many women and girls to own their ground and champion their true identity in society. The more the space of self-actualization enlarges for women, the more the society presents the ideas of whom they are supposed to be. That is portrayed through the strengthening of the standards of beauty, dress, education, or even social conduct. With the differentiation in culture, it has become a challenge to attain a uniform standard of identity for all the women of the globe. For instance, what a white woman would consider beautiful would not be the same for a black woman in an underprivileged society. Consider a black girl who sees having white skin as her ultimate goal to attain a true beauty identity. A white woman may not see it that way and may focus on other areas of actualization of beauty.
Also, beauty brands use the faces of celebrity figures and models as the faces of their beauty products. The more the teenagers consume the beauty content, the more they assume the images to be depicting the universal standard of beauty. That shapes the notion of their true identity in the world, and they start working towards attaining the standards. A study by Elflein (2024) highlights that 23% of U.S. women are in serious need of losing weight. That has been a key lifestyle trait with having a fit body viewed as the ultimate standard to feminine beauty. That has seen many women join fitness classes not because they want to be fit but because they want the sense of beauty and identity that comes with having a fit body. The key question should be what happens to the women who do not have the luxury of weight loss due to economic or cultural commitments. They are only left with the idea of the ‘perfect’ body. That places them in dire levels of stress and lowers their self-esteem, which may come as a result of disbelief in their natural body form.
The research on the role of social media, specifically TikTok, in the mental health of teenage girls needs to be conducted in order to save a generation from a huge pandemic of falsified standards of body positivity. Much needs to be done to make modern women change their mindset on the standards of beauty. Young girls need to learn to embrace their true identity and refrain from pegging their happiness on the projections of society and other people. That can only be attained through the control of the type of information consumed by teenage girls.
Findings and Discussion
From the data collected from the research respondents, it was evident that many women struggle with their true beauty identity. The Social Institute (2024) states that 87% of girls follow their favorite models and mentors on their social media platforms. The lifestyle of the models plays a significant role in influencing the girl’s perception of the reality of beauty. In most cases, they are tempted to copy what their mentors do on the internet. The copy culture is a significant challenge majorly for the followers who cannot afford the lifestyle. That leaves many girls in dire levels of stress. Just like Orlowski (2020) illustrates in his documentary, Social Dilemma, the continued reliance on social media has more adverse effects than it meets the eye. With the media platforms earning billions in advertisement, they employ whatever means possible to keep the user glued to the screen. They bank on the interests of the user and generate AI-assisted algorithm content, which keeps the user even more interested. That creates a form of addiction that makes people the slaves of the media platforms. The more the youth stay glued to the screen, the lesser their quality of physical relationships, a move that may leave one having symptoms of social anxiety and loneliness. They are only focused on becoming the best and feeding off the energy of social media approval. For a girl to be considered sexy and attractive, the universal standard is to have a curved body shape. That is the condition that dictates the number of likes one gets from the social media audience.
Digital marketing has been on the rise in the 21st century. Brands are utilizing all the possible strategies to ensure that their products reach the targeted audience. Celebrity endorsement has been one of the strategies that brands use to market their products (Wang et al., 2017). Female celebrities are utilized to market female-related products like cosmetics and fashion goods. With female celebrities attracting millions of followers, they set the bar for beauty way too high for the normal girl to attain. Additionally, the TikTokers are endorsed with sponsorship to promote certain products and ideas over their platforms. With that, they have little control over what their followers consume.
Body shaming is another factor that was heavily mentioned in the research. Many of the respondents did not feel comfortable about their current body size. They had an ideal body shape which was inspired by an image seen over the internet. Dieting is one of the ways through which many teenage girls strive to control their weight. They deliberately limit their food intake in order to lose weight and acquire a certain desired body size. Dyer (2021) highlights that 38% of U.S. teens are actively trying to lose weight. A high number of teens peg their need to have a better shape on the need to become more physically appealing.
Conclusion and Recommendations
The paper has highlighted the impacts of TikTok body positivity trends on teenage girls in the U.S. The teenage age is the stage where an individual acquires key knowledge about their sexuality and identity. It is a crucial stage of identity development, and teenagers need to be granted a fair social environment to learn the right attributes of their society and about themselves. The TikTok body positivity is only geared towards channeling individuals to lead a certain defined lifestyle standard. That is strategically meant to make the teenagers potential customers to positive body brand products. To maintain the body image portrayed in the media, one will need to invest time and resources. Fitness and cosmetic brands bank on that for their future profitability.
Much needs to be done to cushion the youth from negative social media influence. The government needs to put in filtration mechanisms that regulate the media content available to under-age media consumers. TikTok should come up with a kid’s version that is only accessible to under-age children. To attain that, one needs to ask for legal authentication for one to own an account. Mental health is a real threat to the current and future generations. Much needs to be done to save the current and future generations from harmful and misleading digital content.
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