Panic World - Why eating disorder content is all over the internet

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

Eating disorder content has been a problem on the internet since as early as 2001, but it accelerated with the advent of social media. Today we’re examining why it’s become more prevalent than perhaps at any other time. EJ Dickson, a writer who investigated the #SkinnyTok community for The Cut, joins us to talk about the introduction of eating disorder content in the mainstream internet, its causes and characters. Our guest EJ Dickson is a senior writer at The Cut. You can check out her investigative piece on Liv Schmidt and #SkinnyTok here, and follow her work everywhere @ejdickson. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to our Discord? Sign up for just five bucks a month at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Just a quick public service announcement. Today's episode is going to be talking about bulimia, anorexia, eating disorder content. It gets pretty graphic at times. If that's something that triggers you, just maybe this is one to skip. You know who is a really good freak entering the canon? Will Blunderfield is my favorite freak. Who's that? You've definitely seen him before.

Oh, the drinking, the drinking pee guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a. I love this guy. What thing is using, like, really. disgusting language. Hummus canon bonding is the key to peace. So he calls like, like his dick is a hummus canon. Like his whole thing is like using really gross like language to describe like his dick involves and also like his content is heavily homoerotic. Yeah.

Like even more so than the usual like spiritual manosphere influencer. He's a very good internet freak, I would say. His videos are very, like, they're filmed, like, inspirational content, too, which I really appreciate. Like, he's really fired up about, like, drinking his own pee and whatever. So, like, I think that's great. Um, I ask you that, though, because you and I think have been sort of covering this, this beat for around the same time. And I feel like we've seen a lot of the same horrible stuff.

And covering guys like this, it's always been part of the job. And it's, you know, a little fun, like, lifting up a rock and look at the bugs underneath. But covering the internet, like, isn't always fun. And there's stuff that just sort of. of comes around all the time. And it feels like we're in a moment right now where eating disorder content is really prevalent online again in a big way. So joining us is E.J. Dixon of New York Mags the Cut. You wrote about this new era of eating disorder content, which is sometimes called Skinny Talk, if you're seeing it on TikTok, but it's everywhere. And it's an evolution

of a problem that the internet has been dealing with since the very beginning. In your piece, you focused on an influencer who really captures the current problem. And today we're going to look at how eating disorders became mainstream online once again and how platforms are or rather aren't dealing with them compared to how they used to deal with them. I'm Ryan Broderick, sometimes joining us as our producer Grant Irving. Sometimes I am mute his microphone and allow him to speak. And this is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And one of the sort of drum beats of our show has been like protecting children online. It's something that we've accused politicians of only the world.

doing performatively. And I think, you know, what we're going to be talking about today really exemplifies that. But to start, I want to get a gut check from you of where we are with eating disorder content online. You know, what is it like now versus what it used to be like? Oh, it's 100 percent become more normalized. It's 100 percent become more mainstream and normalized. This was something that existed on the fringes. You would have to go out looking for it. Like Twitter banned hashtags like proana or pro-mia, which is the pro-bolemia hashtag for quite some time. It wasn't until Elon Musk assumed control of the platform that that type of content just started becoming rampant. Like this was something. I'm shocked that that that happened. I'm absolutely

shocked that Elon Musk made something worse online. Yeah. I mean, this was this was something that I think tech platforms were aware of and tried to do their best to control for quite some time. And then with the culture are becoming more conservative, and Elon Musk assuming control of X, et cetera. Like, I think that they just really don't care anymore. And it's omnipresent. And it's encouraged in some ways. I think there's a lot more space for this type of content than there was 10, 15 years ago. It used to be something that you would sort of search for shamefully.

Like, I would have these folders on my phone of, like, all this stuff I had saved from, like, ED Twitter and I put it under like a completely different title on my because I didn't want people to find it. And now I feel like there's just no, there's no shame. Yeah, it's just totally normalized and totally mainstream. I group eating disorder content in with like terrorism and I'm going somewhere with this. Hold on. I group it in with like terrorism, non-consensual sexual material, child of sexual abuse material

as like these things that when social media turns out. on in late 2000s or 2010s, all of a sudden we can see it. It's like, it's like come out of the fringes of the internet and these companies now have to deal with it. And for the most part, they kind of did. Like, they kind of got ISIS off the internet. They kind of got rid of like most of the worst Indian disorder content where like I was a big, I still am a big Tumblr user.

And I remember in the early 2010s, if I came across ED Tumblr posts, it was because like I really went off the beaten path of what was on my dashboard. Like, and then I would kind of... You had to try. You'd have to look for it. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the great tragedies, I think, of the 2020s and of, like, doing this kind of job to watch all of that stuff come back.

Yeah. And come back in a way where, like, the company's in charge is do not care. And they don't even really pretend to care like they used to. And just how quickly it happened. Like, I totally agree with you. That's something that I think about a lot. I mean, it's almost like after 2020, like with COVID. a switch turned on, you know?

And then that switch turned on again after Trump was elected. It was like, well, we don't have to care about this shit anymore. Exactly. This isn't a problem. Like, woke is dead. But it's not about woke. I mean, it's about like leaving a body count, you know, even if it's not a quantifiable body count. We wanted to kind of get a better sense of like what the online history of ED content looked like.

And so we sent our researcher Adam down the rabbit hole to sort of find the earth. earliest examples we could find of like platforms dealing with this, not the earliest examples of that community. But so, so this is really interesting stuff. So in July 2001, which in my own research, is sort of feels like the year the internet kind of became what it looks like. That's like the first memes start to appear into it in 2001. So time.com publishes an investigative report titled a wave of pro anorexia websites. And it reads, anorexics and would be anorexics around the globe can now access more than four 400 websites. Oh, wow. 400 websites designed solely for...

They counted one by one, yeah, on Google. So they can access more than 400 websites designed solely for them. Need to know how to disguise your weight loss so concerned. Read jealous. Friends will stop hounding you to eat. Look for a few words of support as you launch into your latest deprivation diet. Or perhaps you'd like to know the tricks for satisfying that pesky weekly weigh in at the doctor's office. It's all right here. Throughout the sites, visitors are bombarded by a barrage of thin inspirations as one of the site's names its pro-thin quotes. And then it cites, nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.

And that is eight years also before Kate Moss makes it mainstream. In 2003, a statistical review of pro-anorexia websites yields some pretty interesting results. So it finds that there are 500 pro-ano websites now, 100 eating disorder recovery sites, and 20 sites run by actual doctors. And of those 500, 64% included a biography of someone running the site. 94% had motivational content. 75% had methods to avoid detection.

49% had support groups helping to enforce the behavior. And only 5% mentioned the mortality risks of anorexia. That's really interesting. I would venture to guess that those percentages are pretty much equivalent now in terms of like contents that is geared at helping people with eating disorders and content that is geared at exacerbating eating disorders. Like, I think the breakdown would probably be very similar. Like, you see it on TikTok.

There are a lot of eating disorder experts on TikTok who are actually credentialed and know how to treat people. They don't get the views as Liv Schmidt does. Right. Liz Schmidt, who you focus on in your piece, she's probably one of the bigger influencers of this new era. And we're going to get to her in the next act. But one thing people like Schmidt don't do is actually say the word eating disorder.

They don't admit that that's what's happening. whether it's because they're trying to circumvent sensors or because they just don't want to, you know, say it out loud to themselves. Which is really interesting when you look at older communities for eating disorders who were actually quite up front about the fact that that's what they had and that's what they were doing. It's actually very interesting when you compare that to the older eating disorder communities online, you know, in the 90s who were very upfront about the fact that they had an illness. A lot of these sites have been lost to time, thankfully. but thanks to a study published by Bridgewater State University, we do have some screenshots and some sort of like copies of these sites. So I have an excerpt here.

Warning, this site describes my current daily struggles and may be offensive to some surfers, which I think is of reference to like surf. It also serves as a warning of what your life could be like if you dwell into a life of obsession of weight, calories, and an uncontrollable fear of food, fat, and life in general. This site could be detrimental to your health if you are easily triggered. If you disagree with this, do not enter. Click your browser's back button and find something more saying to do with your time. Thank you.

Click to enter my world. Wow. And then the paper also reads, eating disorders are dangerous. It has an excerpt from another site. Eating disorders are dangerous and ignorance compounds that. We can't go ask for safe advice from non-EDs without a risk of being hospitalized or shunned. Pro-ED to me means understanding there's no shame in how we are. and acceptance that this is how we will continue to be for an indefinite period of time.

It means support for us so we don't have to deal with this alone. The communal aspects of this are like so tied into it, even from the very beginning of this online community. Absolutely. And it's because it's a very private thing to struggle with an eating disorder. It's something that it's very internal. It's something that you kind of take pride in being internalized, if that makes any sense. this is your secret, you know?

Like, you've, you figured out this, like, this way to, like, gain control over, over your body, and nobody knows about it. Like, it's, it kind of comes with this little, little thrill. But it's also very isolating. And I think that the internet really provided a communal aspect for people with needing disorders that had never really existed before. Like, there was an actual way for people who had been struggling with this privately

to, to talk about it and to trade like, you know, for better or for worse, like to trade tips and hacks, but also to just sort of like empathize with each other. By March 2012, we've now entered the social media age. So it's everywhere. PBS is covering it. I mean, I don't think there's anything particularly about Tumblr's UI that makes it like a hotspot for ED content so much as it just has a really young user base. Unless, I mean, is there anything you've come across that like specifically Tumblr offers?

Oh, yeah. Image-based. I mean, it's image-based. It's also the demographic. You know, I mean, and Pinterest also, you know, it was image-based and had a pretty big E-D content problem, if I remember correctly. But, yeah, I mean, I think it was a demographic. The people who used Tumblr were different than the people who used, like, Twitter or Snapchat.

You know, these were, like, dark, brooding 15-year-old girls who, like, read Sylvia Plath and drank coffee. Smoke cigarettes, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it was pretty much like ideally tailored for that demographic. I was trying to think about this like, okay, like when was the first like mainstream online eating disorder meme to like break through like from the corner of the web? And in my mind it's 2012 and it's the thigh gap discourse. Remind the listeners what the thigh gap discourse was. So the definition is that your thighs shouldn't touch when you stand straight up kind of.

of like it there should be a gap there because you're so skinny and I feel like I first saw it on Tumblr but then I saw it make the jump to 4chan where like users were like this is how women should look I feel like that was sort of the order for me I think I first saw it on Instagram with like the photos like I have a very specific memory of like 2012 2013 Instagram posts of like just a girl's legs and their thighs not touching. I actually have a question that I'm going to try to answer right now with the power of know your meme because I'm curious, which is which came. Ah, okay.

So thigh gap discourse came before hot dog legs. Yeah, that sounds right. Hot dog legs, I feel like it was like 2014. Summer 2013, yeah. Sick. Yeah. So, yeah. Because like hot dog leg.

Hot dog, we both have used our brains really well over the last. Yeah, that's literally exactly what I was just thinking. Yeah, great. No, but like, Hot Dog Legs to me is like one of the first big like Instagram memes, like Instagram based memes. But like Thigh Gap discourse, like being an Instagram thing makes a lot of sense, actually. Because like the platform was like blowing up at the time. There were a lot of like concern trolling opeds.

Not concerned trolling. I'll rephrase that. There were a lot of, because I think that some of them were genuinely concerned. But there were a lot of, like, concerned op-eds being like, oh, my God, like, what is this brand-new thing that, like, I've never heard of that's reinforcing all these, like, toxic body image issues in women? And I was, I mean, I remember hearing about the Thigh Gap in, like, 2005. This is a thing that, like, all the girls in junior year of high school were talking about. So, again, it's like, it's like everything else in the ED communities online. And it's same wine bottles, new labels.

I mean, do you remember anything kind of equivalent to that around the same time? Because it feels like 2012 is the moment where like a lot of online communities, suddenly get discovered because of like digital media, like outlets, like popping online and media kind of covering the internet more seriously. So you get these moments with a lot of communities. But the Thigh gap discourse to me feels like important there. Yeah, that's, I think that's probably right. Like that was the first example of something that sort of became mainstream.

from the ED corners of the internet. It's also the moment where algorithms have now started to mindlessly recommend this stuff. So, I mean, this is the start of like the road that takes us to Gamergate, takes us to men's rights activism, takes us to everything that now kind of has ruined the world. And Teen Vogue in 2013 talks a little bit about the algorithmic impact on ED content. So they write, when a girl's in recovery, it can be hard to resist the pull of these comforting communities. Casey, a girl that they're writing about, no longer uses Tumblr, but hasn't shut herself off from social media entirely. I use Facebook and Instagram without being in any pro-ana community, she explains.

Some people have better self-control, but once the disorder gets you, it's hard to stay away. There are pro-ana images everywhere if you want to find them. I guess what I'm wondering is, like, does it work the same way as we've seen with, like, political content where, like, the algorithm suddenly starts to know that you want more and more extreme content in this particular way? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I've experienced it firsthand. My for you page, because of me doing the story, is entirely pro-ana content now. And I remember talking to TikTok about this, their sort of defense for the fact that people's, that I kept constantly getting fed this content was, oh, well, we don't feed that content

to people unless they engage with it. Like, unless they spend a certain amount of time on it or unless they favorite it, like, we're not going to feed that to you. So it was essentially like victim blaming, I guess. Like, and I was like, you don't see that as a problem. Like you don't, you don't see that as a problem that your algorithms are so like soulless, I guess, for lack of a better term, that they just keep on feeding content to like vulnerable people. It's crazy that she thought that was a solid defense. Yeah, I mean, this is around the same time.

A lot of these sites start experimenting with time on site metrics. So they're just like looking for content that can keep you using the site. And so there's a lot of communities that get activated that way. Just to note quickly, while the communities were largely on image-based sites, we have research from a 2016 study showing it was very active on Twitter. Now, that's probably because Twitter is the easiest to search. But all this is to say they were across the whole internet. And there's a couple posts the study captured. So one reads, it's just a fat girl trying to get seen.

skinny, height six, uh, height five six, current weight, whale, goal weight, lighter than air. And another one reads, just an average girl dying for perfection. Follow me. I don't bite. Excuse the pun. As these platforms become more mainstream and as the content on them becomes more scrutinized, like the users start to figure out like they can hide, they're they're hiding from each other while trying to find each other. I mean, it seems like the dynamic that's still playing out now. Oh yeah, for sure. That's the history. The sites, you know, the big platforms, they appear in the 2010s. They try to make this stuff hard to find. It becomes more communal than aspirational.

But then we get the influencer era that undoes almost all of that work. And that brings us to your piece. Did you get a sense of when the influencer age for ED content? Like when did it switch from just random users to like genuine ED celebrities, let's call them? Well, I think it's always existed to some degree or another. I mean, I remember being on ED Twitter and they're being sort of like micro celebrities that like everybody. the community knew about and there would be like inside jokes about them. But that's, you know, people with a couple thousand followers.

It was nothing like this. I think the moment, the birth of the ED influencer sort of came about because of Skinny Talk, and I think it's because these people figured out how to and hijack the language of female empowerment to package their material. That's kind of the thing that I think is new about this. not something that I really saw on EG Twitter or E.D. Tumblr, sort of this idea that, like, you are in control of your feet. Like, it's almost feminist to starve yourself, you know? Like, that's not something Lishmitt would say. She would sort of, like, dance around saying that,

but that's kind of the subtext of a lot of her content. Like, you go, Girl Boss, like, way to take your diet into your, into your own hands. Like, being thin is empowering. That is, um, a very subtle shift, but I think it's it had tremendous impact because they they gave themselves plausible deniability, right? Like, Liv Schmitt's whole defense is I'm not promoting eating disorders. I'm promoting being healthy or I'm promoting wellness. And if you look at the language that she uses superficially, like it does seem like that, right? Like she's advocating for smaller portions. She's advocating for moving your body more. What's wrong with that? She's advocating for eating healthy. What's wrong with that? It's a very facile view.

of the content she posts and one that kind of ignores the, like a lot of the context and a lot of the history behind these types of spaces. So when we come back from the break, we're going to look at how someone like Liz Schmidt came into popularity and why this problem is now worse than it's ever been. But that's after a word from our sponsors. You recently wrote an article titled, The Influencer Inspiring Girls to Eat as Little As Possible. And everyone should check it out.

It's a great article. And I wanted to sort of start with having you tell us a little bit about this woman, Emma, and how she came to find an influencer that wanted to pay for weight loss advice. Emma was a woman in her 30s who had recently broken up with her boyfriend. And her boyfriend had been incredibly cruel about her weight and said that nobody would ever love her. She wasn't, like, wildly overweight, I think, but it was the heaviest that she had, like, been in her life, I believe, at that point. And it really stuck with her after the breakup. So she decided to look online to find a way to lose weight. And that's how she found Liv Schmidt. How'd she become so popular? Yeah, Liv Schmidt is probably the biggest influencer on Skinny Talk. There are definitely others who have pretty large platforms, but I think she's probably. the most well known in part because she was kicked off of TikTok in 2024. And that got a lot of press attention and sort of raised the profile of Skinny Talk in general.

And my reaction in terms of like the first time I saw her content, I mean, it was twofolds. I was horrified. It reminded me a lot of the stuff I had seen on E.D. Tumblr 10, 15 years ago. And frankly, I also thought it was pretty smart. I thought Like from a content perspective Yes, sorry Yeah Please don't put that out of context

And post that all over social media Yeah, and I thought from a marketing perspective It was unfortunately very savvy Because she wasn't really selling An eating disorder She was selling a lifestyle She was saying, starve yourself And you can look like me

And you can live like me And you can go to Candleight Pilates and drink macha and yeah she's figured out how to do something to make this kind of content more appealing and harder to take down and the platforms are doing even less now but we'll get to that in a minute let's look at her youtube page and take a vibe check we have one titled how to stay sustainably slim forever how to create a bikini body on a budget how to get skinny a recipe by Liv Schmidt. She's doing basically just like a lot of like thin spoke content and the views are pretty big. I mean, especially because like this kind of content I feel like for a long time was

actually kind of hard to find on mainstream platforms and has made a huge resurgence in the year's sense. So like how would you sort of describe where Liv Schmidt fits into the ecosystem, the larger ecosystem of like eating disorder content? Well, Liv Schmidt started out as a pretty standard lifestyle influencer. She would post like Get Ready With Me videos and, you know, workout videos. Then she kind of gravitated over to the Thinspo side, but it's like very thinly veiled Thinspo, I would say. Like she's never going to post something that explicitly says nothing tastes as good

as skinny feels, but she'll come as close as possible as she can to saying that without actually saying it. So her whole thing is making slimness, uh, elevating slimness into like an aesthetic onto itself. Like it's a way of life. It's not even just about like losing weight or being thin. Her whole thing is like slimness is a mindset. And her page is full of all of these photos of like very beautiful models, like

sipping coffee on a piazza in Rome or like, you know, sitting on a yacht. These ladies love piazzas. They love piazzas in Rome. All the videos, have seen are like apparel sprits is in and like not eating in Italy, which I think is an insane idea to go to Italy and not eat food personally. Yeah, all of the photos are of like very hot women not eating in Italy, very hot women not eating on a yacht, like very hot women putting on sunglasses and not eating and standing

on a corner in Soho. And Liv herself kind of encapsulates this aesthetic because she's a model. She's very conventionally attractive. And she posts all these videos where she kind of like just shows up. her lifestyle where she's like grabbing macha and soho or she's just like standing there in an alo yoga set and like a millionaire comes by and his rolls royce to like ask for her number like it's very aspirational content for a certain type of young woman yeah and it's interesting to me how closely tied it is to like the appearance of wealth which is something i've noticed in the manosphere recently

as well like this idea that uh like if you follow these sort of like toxic gender ideology online like it is implied that you will also be wealthy or look wealthier it's a it does feel like a more modern twist on this than what you would have seen like 20 years ago does that seem right yeah I think so I mean it's very much like pro an a Tumblr 2.0 like in the visual language on Tumblr was very very similar right 10 years ago it was like you know photos of Audrey Hepburn or like close-ups of jutting collarbones or you know you Kate Moss smoking a cigarette. This is kind of a twist on that, I guess.

Like, it's, like, the visual language is very similar. But as you said, like, it's more wealth infused. It's more, and more, like, ostensibly health and wellness infused. I mean, she's doing a few things that, like, from a content perspective, I find interesting. Let's watch a video. It's short. The longer version was taken down.

Note, she mutes the word skinny now to avoid any kind of ban. But I think it's a really good example of how manipulative. a lot of this stuff can be. You don't get by fearing food. You get sq by losing the obsession. You can eat ice cream, you can eat the burger, and you don't need to spiral. What you actually need is the mental space.

The goal isn't to shrink your waste and expand your obsession. The goal is shrink the obsession with food and reclaim your damn life. You're wasting your life, Googling the next diet, when you could be making money, building something, being successful,

making a life for yourself, becoming someone, being someone, but you're locked in a mental prison over whether a strawberry has too much sugar. Okay, you guys, knock it off. We have a bit of the longer video transcribed here. I want to read it because I think it's very indicative of like the game that she's playing with these platforms. So she says, today I'm going to tell you the food shame that fixes that made me and then

she bleeps skinny or redax it without shame and how to actually eat like a naturally thin woman. Everyone is overcomplicating weight loss like it's a nuclear code. Keto, carnivore, carb, cycling, seed oils, tracking, fasting like you are trying to get lean and land a rocket at the same time. Which one is it? Are you trying to get lean or land a rocket? Because I don't know which one you're trying to do.

The most naturally slim woman in the world aren't doing any of that. They're just not obsessed. They're not living like food is their friend or their enemy. You're not addicted to food. You're addicted to guilt every time you eat something joyful. And what's crazy is like when you write it out and you read it like that, you read it that like that's almost exactly how like Andrew Tate talk. Like if you just were to like slide in any other kind of toxic corner of the internet,

they all kind of talk like this now. The trappings of modern life are like weighing you down and you can free yourself if you watch enough of my content. It is slightly different from what I would have seen on Tumblr like 15 years ago where it was like it felt more, I felt less polished maybe. Oh yeah. I mean aesthetically it's definitely more polished. It's more thoughtful. I think it's better written, although I suspect that most of her captions are written by ChatGPT.

For sure. It borrows more from the language of like the wellness industry and to some extent like the spirituality industry. But if you really boil it down, I mean, it's not that different. They were selling an aesthetic on Tumblr, on Proana Tumblr. And, you know, it was basically the same. Sure. Can both of you just sort of break down what sentences like, naturally slim women and you're not addicted to food, you're addicted to guilt.

Can you guys just break down what that kind of framing is doing to a listener who finds this content? For this exercise, let's group like EDI internet and with like other forms of extremism, which I think ideologically, like you could make that argument. It operates the same way, right? This woman is kind of talking like Andrew Tate or Alex Jones or any of these other people who do this, Q and on people. Like at some point in the last like five to ten years, a lot of the influencers in these spaces started to talk like self-help gurus. And they used the language of like self-help and motivational speech to bring people in because it's a really effective way of getting people to buy your membership or join your club, which is why we have to kill all life coaches.

They're a disease. But no, but I mean, it's grip. He's nodding. I just want to point out that if you're just watching that. Both E.J. and Grant are both nodding enthusiastically that we have to kill all life coaches. No, but, like, it is grifter language. It is the same language as someone trying to sell you, like, a bottle of heroin at a carnival in 1910. I would have bought a bottle of heroin at a carnival.

100%. Like, oh, my God. Taking medicinal cocaine and watching, like, a 12-second short film that I thought was real in a tent somewhere. It blows your mind. Get me out of here. Like, unbelievable. In reporting this, like, I was really struck by how a lot of the language that she used was very similar to Keith Renere, the guy who ran nexam. Totally.

Yeah, like, as somebody, I covered the nexium trial. So you sat through and you would hear, you know, the prosecutor read, like, through all these marketing materials and text messages. And a big thing with a nexium that didn't get a lot of attention was that he put a lot of emphasis on weight loss. And on weight loss and skinniness as like exemplary of empowerment and self-discipline and building yourself up and making you stronger. But really, I mean, it was just that he was more attracted to women who were of a certain body type. And a lot of the language that she used was very, very similar to the language that he used in like text messages to these women. Like that said a lot to me. There's something like we talked about, we did an episode where we like asked people to like send in stories.

about like their loved ones being sucked into conspiracy theories. And like, I think I brought this up on that episode where like there's this pattern you can see in a lot of like of the darker corners of the internet where someone promises you a perfect life by looking inward and giving you the tools to find that within yourself for for money. And it's like you can sort of abstract it that way where it's like if someone on the internet is saying like pay me $5 a month and I will help you find something that's already inside of you that you don't need anything. external help with like that to me is always a red flag of just like this person is is this is a con artist at best yeah it's just so except for us if you give us five dollars a month we will help you live your best life uh here at panic world patreon.com slash patrick.com pageantown.com slash panic club okay uh anyways uh let's get back to live and how she's monetizing and updating something this awful so uh she once reposted tictock with

the caption girls be 300 pounds saying i'm a snack no Megatron, you're the fucking vending machine. Eat like you're the main character, because you are, she writes in one post. Eat like your highest self is watching. Eat like your next way in is tomorrow. Her rule of thumb is simple. Eat whatever you want. Just eat as little

as possible. You're not restricting. You're regulating it chic. Essentially like glamorizing having an eating disorder. I mean, it was the same on pro-ana Tumblr 10, 15 years ago. I remember being on those blogs and you wouldn't see anything about what it's

actually like to starve yourself. You wouldn't see anything where girls would be like, I have fur growing on my arms or like, I, you know, my breath smells terrible because I'm constantly like binging and purging and, and or they wouldn't say things like, um, you know, I lost my period or my hair's falling out. Like it was all just like these beautifully composed images of like very slim women perched on a ledge, like smoking a cigarette or, you know,

standing over like this was the early two things. 2010, so like, standing over some, like, emo guy, like, black and white and silhouette, you know, like, it's very sexualized, very glamorized. Like, it's essentially the same. It's just the aesthetic is a little bit different. A lot of owls. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Another new innovation here is the membership program, which I feel like is sort of the hallmark of the modern influencer racket. So can you tell us a little bit about, like, what she was providing for people and how her membership structure worked? Yeah, she offered the subscription service called the Skinny Society with an accent... Jesus Christ, okay. An accent e-goul over the last E. And again, you know, feeding into this whole language of like sophistication and wealth. But basically for, I believe, $20 a month, she would post exclusive content to paying subscribers that was like workout videos or what I eat in a day.

that was something that her followers really wanted to see all the time, and there was such demand for it that she smartly decided to put it behind a paywall. And as part of the subscription service, you also got access to these group chats with other members. And these were ostensibly framed as, like, accountability groups to support each other and help people maintain their weight loss goals. But after joining them, like, it became clear, like, within a span of, like, two minutes that they were just pro-ana forums in a different form.

Did any of the group chat conversations surprise you in any way? Oh my God, they surprised me every day. They were so shocking. Just the openness, I think, was the most shocking thing. Just the openness with which these young women were discussing these very clearly disordered and just the fact that they were not only like getting reinforced but applauded by the other members, that was pretty shocking. And a lot of times, something that came up in a lot of the threads was some girl would say something like, oh, my mom is really concerned about my involvement in this

group because I'm losing like a tremendous amount of weight in a very short period of time, which is why I'm so grateful for you ladies for serving as my community and like you're the only people who I really understand me right now. Instead of seeing that, like, like as a red flag of like maybe you shouldn't be super involved in this group if you're losing a tremendous amount of weight and your loved ones are like expressing concern for you everybody was like yes that's so true like you go mama like stick with your goals you got this that was shocking to me um just that nobody really was able to stand up and say this is a fucking problem like this is not you have a problem this is not okay i like i really cannot imagine that

that like, when I was at my most depressed, it was like four people I love being like, you sound fucked up. It was right before we met. It's true. Ryan solved everything. But I just like, but I just like, he pays me $5 a month that I help to do with depression. No, no, just like, just if you imagine, like if I imagine that and instead it was the, it was the opposite inputs.

Because it was only, it was only the, I was like, well, I trust these people. I trust these people. And if they're telling me something is wrong, then something is wrong. And I got to listen to that. And just like, imagining that you had the exact opposite impulses, like voices in your head, I don't know how you combat that. Yeah, you can't. I mean, that's what colds do.

That's like one of the primary tenets of cults is that they realign your moral compass, or the people that you usually listen to and trust are not the people that you listen to and trust anymore. They're the enemies. That's what Scientology does. That's what Nexium did. And to a certain extent, that's what Liz Schmidt's skinny society, I think, did. I mean, I saw it every day.

People would say shit like that every day. Like, my friend is concerned for me. My parents are worried that I'm not eating. What should I do? What should I tell them? And nobody, not one person, said, well, maybe you should listen to your parents. They all uniformly said, don't worry. Like, they're just hating because you're like on your own journey.

and they're jealous. Just keep going. You got this. And that was fucking crazy to watch, honestly. And you write in your piece, it feels like everyone is enabling each other's eating disorders, Annie, a 20-year-old former member of the group told me, she joined the skinny society because she had gained a little bit of weight

in recovery from anorexia, and Schmidt's advice seemed simple and straightforward enough. Eat less and walk more. It didn't take long, however, for Annie to realize that there was something wrong. It was extremely competitive. Who could eat less? Who weighed less? Who was living the most skinny lifestyle?

So you join these chats, which Instagram DMs. I love to hear how they function. Like, what did you see in there? You pay for the service, and then you have the choice to join. You're only supposed to join one. I joined all 21 of them, however many of there were at the time. Oh, dear God. Yeah.

I mean, I would leave one and then go into another. They have 20, like, group threads, basically, of about 150, 200 members each. And it's basically just this ongoing narration throughout your day where you open your phone and you see a bunch of women competing over how they can more efficiently starve themselves. They're posting their step counts. They would walk like 20,000, 30,000 steps a day. They would post their calorie counts. Some of these women were eating like 800, 900 calories a day. They would post these like before and after photos where you'd see.

these young women losing like an incredible amount of weight, like in a very short amount of time. And at no point did I see anybody else on these threads say, like, hey, maybe you should slow down or just enjoy, you know, have it, have a cupcake every once in a while. You don't have to like spiral every time you have a cupcake. They would all just constantly reinforce each other. They would say, oh, you look great.

Oh my God, I'm so jealous. Like, I can't believe your stomach looks so flat. Tea, body goals. And they would like trade. for like, oh, you should use mouth tape so you don't like snack at night or you should take prunes because they essentially have like a laxative effect. So essentially, you know, like advising people on how to purge like in real time. I ate too many prunes during COVID once and it was a bad, it was a bad time for me.

Do you have a sense of like who are in these groups? It's a range. Initially I thought it was going to be very young women like women around. lives age, but it is definitely a range. There are women in their 40s, 50s, moms. There's a whole group dedicated to moms. But I do feel like it did skew slightly younger. A lot of these girls would talk about being in college and trying to get their steps in,

walking around campus. Sometimes I would see girls talk about graduating from high school or trying to fit into their prom dress. Oh, God. Okay. Yeah. So there were a lot of very young girls in there for sure. I mean, like, I also don't even know what you would do with, like, a DM group on Instagram.

Like, this doesn't, this feels like it's almost, like, moved beyond just like the 2010's kind of question of, like, content moderation. This feels, it feels harder to knock down in a way. Well, I mean, I can tell you what my impression talking to Instagram was while reporting out the story in trying to make them realize how big of a problem this was. I certainly didn't get the sense that they saw it as a priority. Shocking. the people on Meta's press team didn't seem to find any problem with it. I mean, yeah, like, I mean, did they give you like the typical runaround, like we're looking into it or was there, is there, you know, how are those conversations going?

Yeah, it was actually more extensive than that. It was, we're looking into it. And then it was, and I sent a couple posts that I saw Liv had put up that I felt had pretty clearly violated their content guidelines because they ostensibly ban content that glamorizes eating disorders, right? Like they have, as they put it, very clear guidelines planning this type of content. But clearly, it's not that clear because the stuff that Liv is posting on a daily basis about, you know, eating a thousand calories a day or how everybody should walk like 25,000 steps. Like that's, you know, clearly in violation, in my opinion.

It's encouraging disordered eating behavior. So first, I sent them a couple posts and they were like, we took down those posts. But I was like, okay. what's happening. That's great. But like, what are you going to do with, like, the account or what are you going to do in terms of the fact that she is monetizing telling young women how to starve themselves? And they were like, we're looking into it. And I sent them, I told them explicitly, like, I went through the, this is kind of boring, like, reporting step by step.

I don't know how interesting you're going to find this. No, it's super interesting. Yeah. I wanted to know if I could verify that some of the. the members of the groups were minors. And that's kind of difficult to do because obviously a lot of people are using a burner account or they're not using their full names. But of the two, I can't do math, like I'll say like 8,000 members. Okay. I'll just like estimate of the 8,000 members, like and of the people who use their full names in their Instagram accounts, I was able to

verify that at least a dozen were still enrolled in high school. So, and I sent these accounts. I was like, hey, you know, this girl is 17 years old. This girl is 14 years old. She's posting about, you know, running track her sophomore year and she's part of this group chat. Like, does that concern you? Does it concern you that this woman is monetizing her content for this very vulnerable

audience? And it was not until the story came out that they ended up demonetizing her account. They love to wait. And so I genuinely wonder if like tech companies get like a sick throw for making you have to update your story, like waiting until after it comes out to be like, oh, okay, now we've done something. I think it's like a power play. I really do. I think it's just laziness, honestly. Like, I really do because I didn't, nothing I, I didn't surprise them, you know, nothing that we published was stuff that I hadn't communicated

extensively with meta about. So they had the, they had all the information available to make their decision. I think they just didn't want to have to make a decision until they saw what kind of impact the story had. And unfortunately for them, it had some impact. And we're going to talk about that impact and how, first, how it impacted you and also how it impacted Liv's business after the break and a word from our sponsors. You've mentioned a few times, like, throughout this episode, like your own experiences with, you know, EDI internet. Like, did, what, was there like a personal toll to reporting on, on Lips Schmidt? Like, did it bring up, like, complicated feelings for you? You talked about, like,

your for you or your explore page like being totally taken over by this content like how do you how do you navigate that it was horrible it was so fucking scary it was yeah i mean i have been in therapy for a very long time and i haven't been therapy right not chat gbtt the fact that you have to specify is like so terrifying yes i have been in therapy with a human since i was 14 15 years old working on these types of issues i've also been reporting for a really long long time, like as long as you have, probably. And I had thought that I could sort of bolster myself against just this constant onslaught of language about being thin and losing weight and how important it is to be thin. And I just couldn't. I did not have my defenses up. I just could not.

Like, within probably a few hours, I started just constantly, like, reverting to the old things that I used to do to try to lose weight or like filling up with ice water or with green tea or like eating nothing but like a bag of popcorn all day and and thinking constantly about step counts because that was the stuff that everybody in my DMs was talking about and it wasn't like I was getting these messages like once every day or something this was this was once every five minutes right It was probably in some ways the most traumatizing, not traumatizing. Traumatizing is the wrong word. Like triggering?

I guess I hate that word. Yeah, me too. It's lame. But like, it was useful. Triggering, yes, I guess. It was in some ways the most triggering story I've ever done. Did you, I assume you were sort of like lurking in these groups, right? Like, you weren't participating or anything, right?

No, I wasn't participating. but I was I was lurking in which actually wasn't really like part of the plan. The original story I think was just to try to talk to people who had been in the groups. But they operate like the way they operate is complex enough that I was like, okay, I have to be in these groups to see how like they work firsthand. Which I don't I don't regret, but you know, it did it did come at a come at a cost. Did you ever sort of get the urge to like want to like, I don't know, like message some of the young girls in the group? Yeah, I figured. Constantly.

It was constant. I'm a mom. I wanted to launch into the Love Island, like mommy thing. Sorry, that's wildly inappropriate, like, given the context. Yeah, I mean, I'm a parent, and some of these girls were very young. And so many times I wanted to message them or go into the group and be like, you do not have to do this. You look great. There are more important things in life than being thin.

I just wanted to be like, get help, you know? Like, talk to somebody. Talk to somebody about this. Talk to your parents. Talk to a therapist. This is putting up. on mouth tape so you don't eat after 6 p.m. That's fucking nuts. Also, like, are you just not going to talk for like four or five hours before going to bed?

Like, I guess so. I guess. But that just seems, it seems, I feel like you're just going to be taking the tape off a lot. Like, yeah, I don't know. I, okay, actually, this is a question for you because it's something that I run into all the time when I go too far down a rabbit hole where I start to wonder how real these things are. Like, like, are these people just making up stuff to tell each other or are they actually doing it? No, they're doing it. All right.

So, okay. There's no doubt in my mind. They're doing it. Having, having struggled with this and having done many of the same exact things that they were openly bragging about on these threads, there is no doubt in my mind that they are doing it. Since your reporting has come out, like, do you feel like there's been some momentum around some of these spaces? Like, do you feel like, it does feel like this thing where you have to write about like every three

to five years to like get anyone to care about it? And then, like, as we said, it kind of all gets undone in front of your very eyes. But do you feel like there's been any progress since your piece came out around some of these spaces, some of these people? Meta demonetized live immediately after the story came out. They did not de-platform her, but they demonetized her, meaning that she can no longer charge people to join a subscription service. So it was essentially like the end of the subscription service hosted by Instagram. Hosted by Instagram, correct, yes. So it was essentially the end of the skinny society.

on Instagram. And she went fucking nuclear. She blocked me basically immediately after the story came out. So I only know this from like things that people have sent me or told me. There was talk for some time about like her setting up like an independent subscription service and charging like thousands of dollars so she could provide private weight loss coaching. Like I don't know what the status of those plans is now. But yeah, I mean, I think Instagram did the right thing. for sure. I think she absolutely shouldn't have had the ability to monetize

starving, to monetize telling, you know, minors to starve themselves. I think Instagram probably should have done it before the story came out. Yeah. Was there any response about you particularly flagging, like, you have people under the age of 18 doing this? No, we sent a whole list of questions we heard not a peep until she went on a rampage on her Instagram stories. The thing that I think worries me the most thinking towards the future about this stuff, and it's something that you've mentioned today on the show, but also in your piece,

about the conservative women's magazine Evie, who wrote about her. There is this, like, larger trend happening right now that I'm not even sure like normal people are totally clocking. I'm sure you have noticed this, where the online right is trying to align themselves with, like, some of the worst stuff on the internet and putting it under the banner of conservatism. It's so funny. Yeah. They just put themselves and pretzels over it.

Yeah. Go on. It worries me that something like eating disorders, specifically for women, of course, although conservative men have them too. They just call them like optimization or whatever. Like all of the things that let's say like the liberal establishment spent the 2010s trying to remove from the internet because they're actually. actively harmful for people are now being embraced by conservatives because it means like no

regulation. Like it's like social deregulation. It really worries me to watch this like fascist movement absorbing the worst things on the internet. I don't know how you fix that. It be it like encodes it in like the DNA of our politics in a way that feels very new to me. I mean, I guess in the case of live, like it's all. almost even more dangerous the fact that some people on the right are defending it, right?

Because, I mean, that whole Evie profile is sort of framing her as like, she's a warrior against the toxic body positivity movement. Like, she's prioritizing, like, actual, like, beauty and femininity and real... Liv Schmitt's going to kill Lizzo. Yeah, exactly. I was just going to say, like, she's the Andy Lizzo. Andy Lizzo, yeah. Because Lizzo is, like, the height of relevance for them.

somehow, even though nobody on the left fucking cares about it, though. They're stuck in 24. Yeah. They watched one dove ad for soap in 2015 and lost their mind. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a thing that I think is scary to me is like if the discourse does move more in that direction of like, no, this isn't an eating disorder.

Like this isn't somebody promoting an eating disorder. This is somebody promoting like truth and beauty. This is how women should look. Yeah. And femininity. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. And I see shades of that all over social media on the right. And that is, I do still think it is somewhat fringe, like, as exemplified by, do you remember that post that went viral where that some guy, like, tweeted this photo of like this really beautiful woman and was like, I love a woman with like meat on her, you know, like this somewhat fat body type. Like, and there's huge backlash to that. So I do think that the fact that there is backlash to those.

those types of posts like does exemplify that this is somewhat fringe, but it does concern me for sure, because it's not like we haven't seen a precedent for it before. Yeah. It is very hard to find something hopeful to end on in this episode because it is so grim and dark. But I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about the people that you interviewed who were able to leave, live Schmidt's group. Because I feel like that's probably, though, the most hopeful ray of sunshine we're going to get at the end of our episode today. I love that question. but honestly my answer is like a little depressing. I look, I'm working with what I got.

Like this is the best I could do. So, yeah, anything you've got would be good. Yeah, so I found a lot of these people on Reddit where there's this growing snark subreddit. I don't know if you guys have talked about it like on the podcast. We've talked about snark subredits before, yeah. I was actually going to ask if there was a Liv Schmitts snark subredic. She feels ripe for one.

Yes, there is. And there is. there is a Livshmitt snark, a subreddit, and there is an ED Recovery Snark subreddit. Wait, is the ED Recovery Snark subreddit snark for, how does this, is it people who are in ED recovery doing like a snark subreddit for Thinspo influencers? Yes, correct. Okay, good, good, okay. Yeah.

So I found a lot of people through that. And like, I think that's great that there's sort of this growing movement to counter, like, the power that influencers have, even though it's like snark subreddits are, you know, can often be really toxic and harmful. Like, I think in this case, like, that's, that's a good thing, you know, that these people are becoming disillusioned with lives content and are finding these communities. But the one thing that really depressed me about the women that I spoke, like, I guess there were two things. The first is that they were, they all tended to skew older, like my age, like in their 30s or late 20s.

And like I said earlier, I think that lives fan base tends to skew much younger than that. So it did make me wonder, are the 18, 19, 20, 21-year-olds, like, are they realizing that this is toxic? Are they waking up to this? Or is it just the women who have, you know, who are older and have more life experience and perspective who are waking up to it? So that was one thing that scared me. The other thing, and this was something that I have. thought about a lot since my own experience

reporting out this story is that all of these women, all the women that I spoke to thought that Liv Schmidt was a grifter, right? Interesting. And they all thought that the message that she was peddling

was really harmful and toxic and all that. None of them felt like it wasn't important to be thin. None of them felt like being thin, thin was not there a one priority. And not every woman that I spoke with had an eating disorder, but even those who didn't, they all felt like being thin was the most important thing in the world. Like, they did not disagree with live about that. That was really difficult to hear

because, I mean, an eating disorder is not something that you, like, recover from. You know, it's something that you're constantly struggling with. You just constantly have these messages in your head. Like, you never, you never don't think that being thin is one of the most important things in the world. Like, even if you know that intellectually, it's still something that's always in the back of your mind. And I mean, that's true for me. It's true for, it was true for these women. It's true for basically everyone in recovery. So even though they had got like woken up to how shitty and toxic this group was, they still, they weren't cured, you know, they weren't better. You're never better. It just kind of made me think there's always going to be a captive audience.

for for live schmidt's yeah it is sort of content is one of is unique in in that way it is kind of impossible to get rid of it will exist in the corners of whatever replaces the internet i'm sure that someone is going to build if not already a chat gbt sort of style ed like coach right like this thing is is is always going to be there so like from you covering this stuff like living in that world like is it just about mitigating harm is it just about like minimizing it to the best of our ability? Like is that all we can really ask for in an open information environment like the internet? I think so.

It's kind of a larger question, right, about like whether or not de-platforming actually works. It's something I go back and forth on all the time. I still don't really know. I'm pretty positive that it does. And I think like Elon acquiring X is kind of a case study in that, right? Sure. Before Twitter was bad. but the worst people were off it.

Now the worst people are back on it. And it's infinitely worse. So I kind of think that's proof positive that like de-platforming is effective. And yeah, I mean, I do think like running a social... I don't envy somebody who runs a social media platform. It's not a job I'd want. It's like playing whack them all in a lot of ways.

But, I mean, you got to keep whacking those moles. You got to keep getting the bad actors down. You got to keep working on it or else, you know, there are going to be 10 new ones. I mean, that is the thing that I always get so mad about where it's like all these companies, you know, as they enter the 2020s, they're like, we don't want to deal with it anymore. And they're like, oh, how could you demand that we do something about it? And it's like, motherfucker, we didn't ask you to be Facebook. Like, you asked to be Facebook. No one came to Mark Zuckerberg.

I was like, can you please invent Facebook? Like, you took on the responsibility and then, you know, 15 years into it, you don't want to deal with it anymore. Like, I don't know what to tell you, man. You want to absorb all of human misery and, like, pump it back out to people. Like, that's the job. Well, is it shocking that the person who, like, made a website to rank women is, like, doesn't give a shit about content moderation, you know, they're just getting permission to, like, show themselves now.

They're just showing who they are. And who they are is people who do not give a shit. Like, they just don't. And you know who has a really normal relationship with food in his body? Mark Zuckerberg. Definitely a normal man, if I've ever seen one. How are you doing recovering from reporting on this? Yeah, I feel kind of weird having talked about it so much.

But it was, I mean, it was a very, like, personal experience. And that was also something that, like, a bunch of lives followers and Liv herself were like, oh, she was biased because she was, like, triggered by this. And I honestly, like, to be perfectly honest, like, I think the fact that, like, I was in those communities, made me much better equipped to write about this than somebody who was not. Because, like, I knew all the, like, the code words and all the signifiers and all the context. And there were a lot of people, I think there are a lot of people, apparently some people who even work for these social media platforms, moderating content, who were not aware of that context. So I actually felt, like, somewhat uniquely qualified to do, to do this story for that reason.

How am I doing in, I mean, fine. the second that I recognized that it was a problem I told my husband and like a bunch of other people who I'm close to that you know reporting out the story was like problematic for me and they were basically like well

stop reporting out the story and I was like I can't do that but yeah I mean the second that I was able to unfollow her, I did. And my life is definitely better because of it. I am very, very happy to hear that. Everyone will be very happy to hear that. And I hope everyone who follows her stops following her. Oh my God, me too. So I want to think you were coming on the show. This was as good of a conversation about this topic as it could be. If people want to follow you online, where can they do that? I don't know. I'm on X. I'm on Instagram. I'm on the blue sky.

thing. How do people like read their blue sky handles? Do they read like their whole blue sky handles on the on the air? I just say Ryan hates this and I feel like if you search that I pop up. Oh, okay. You search E.J. Dixon. You can find me and wherever. I wish I had like a better road answer for that. Well, thank you again. This was great. Thank you for having me. Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstead is our production coordinator, and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Devin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of

Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Marianne Couga is their Director of Marketing, and Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show, or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. You can email her at Tracy at courier newsroom.com. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can.