It's hardly news that when you search 'suicide' or 'anorexia' on Tumblr hundreds of pictures come up. But since 15-year-old Tallulah Wilson threw herself under a train allegedly after Tumblr users encouraged her to harm herself, there's been lots of discussion about how to stop these pictures appearing by the second. Or indeed if it's possible at all.
After the inquest into her death ended at the end of last month, Tallulah’s mother asked companies to withdraw advertising from those sites which ‘continue to host inappropriate self-harming and suicide-promoting blogs’ to ‘stop this poison spreading’. It's certainly a thorny issue to stem spreading, especially when over 61% of teenagers say Tumblr is their favourite social network and out of the 70 million Pinterest users 80% of them are women. But where do those pictures even come from in the first place? Turns out it's not always the way you'd expect - as Katie Lowe, 26, found out when she discovered she'd inadvertently fuelled the thinspiration movement.
‘I run a fitness blog and, a few months ago, I was checking my traffic to see how it was doing when I noticed that a picture of me was being shared a lot. I was intrigued, so I went on a bit of a hunt around Google expecting to see that someone had liked a blog I’d written and re-posted it – not that unusual,' she told The Debrief. 'But a few clicks later, there it was - the ‘before and after’ picture I was so proud of (I went from a size 26 to a size 12 in four year), right bang in the middle of thinspiration Tumblr. I admit that for a split second felt chuffed – I was proud of the hard work I’d put in to loose that weight and this felt like recognition of that. But then I realised what was posted around me. One picture had the caption ‘I hate my body’ and another said ‘death to me’. All of them were tagged with the hashtag #thinspo. Unwittingly, and completely without my permission, a picture of me was being used by girls as motivation to starve themselves. I'd become an accidental thinspiration sharer.'
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It was the last thing Katie had thought would happen when she'd first uploaded the picture. 'The last thing I want to be is that person who’s saying “Hey! You should loose weight! It will make you happy!” because I've struggled with my weight for years,' she says. 'In 2010 when I was 22, I was a size 26 and I wieghed 290lbs and I needed crutches to walk. The size was giving me such bad knee pain that I was taking more than 20 painkillers a day – which quickly turned into an opiate addction and a general sense that I had no idea what the hell I was doing. I decided I had to change and, after moving to a flat dangerously positioned above a curry house and across the road from a Subway, I discovered a local gym. Four years later, I’m now a size 12 and I think I look pretty good – hence sharing the picture on my blog.'
As alarmed as she was, Katie felt like she was in a lose-lose situation. 'At first I wanted to shout about how angry I was on Twitter and Facebook, but that would only drive (potentially vulnerable) people to the site and that’s exactly what I wanted to avoid.'
Still, it's made her think very differently about the pictures she now puts online. 'Straight away I deleted any 'before and after' photos I posted online where I look sad in the 'before' pictures and happy in the 'after' pictures as I didn't want them to get picked up by any other thinspo boards. And I told all my fellow fitness bloggers to do the same,' she says. 'I now never post pictures of myself on instagram either because I've learnt that people can so easily steal your pictures without you noticing and post them elsewhere. It's the only way to make sure I'll never find myself in that situation again.'
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.