[dropcap style=”font-size:100px; color:#992211;”]A[/dropcap] curvy Reubenesque beauty or a chubby landwhale?
The answer depends on whether or not you’re a web troll. Or how much you want to hurt the recipient of said phrase. Internet anonymity, we know, brings out a cruel streak in its users. Whilst it’s counterproductive to retaliate, it’s always worth remembering that online abuse very often comes from disturbed individuals whose feelings of powerlessness in an uncaring society which deprioritises social care and intervention prompt them to lash out at any target.
Plus, they’re a bunch of fedora-wearing neckbeards unworthy of your attention.
Cyberbullying and hurtful ‘fat jokes’ are disturbingly prevalent in the social media environment, especially on Twitter, says Wen-ying Sylvia Chou of the National Institutes of Health in the US. Chou is lead author of a study in Translational Behavioral Medicine which analyzed well over a million social media posts and comments about weight matters.
However, the researchers were also happy to find that the news was not all bad: many instances of support and advice were also observed, especially on blogs and forums.
The study is one of the first to analyze how weight is discussed on various social media channels such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, forums, Flickr, and YouTube. Chou and co-author Abby Prestin analyzed 1.37 million posts in the sixty days between 23 January and 23 March 2012, all containing the keywords ‘fat’, ‘obese,’ ‘obesity’ or ‘overweight.’ Compared to ‘obesity’ and ‘overweight,’ ‘fat’ is most often used in colloquial conversations—92 percent of the cases—and it often appears together with words with negative, derogatory or misogynist connotations.
Although blogs and forums produce a small volume of posts, they can support 
in-depth, sustained online exchanges about weight-related topics, including helpful information about healthy eating and weight management. In contrast, 1.25 million or 91 percent of all the relevant posts analyzed are found on Twitter. One in every three of the top relevant retweets contains ‘fat jokes’ or music lyrics which especially stereotype women of certain physiques.
Taken together, a large proportion of user-generated content on social media reflects and reinforces weight stigma. Pervasive negative stereotypes and jokes abound, as do examples of the alienation of overweight people and self-deprecating humor. Even more alarmingly, such negative sentiments extend to verbal aggression, with far too many unchecked instances of flaming and cyberbullying against overweight individuals, particularly women.
“Twitter and Facebook posts are dominated by derogatory and misogynist sentiment, pointing to weight stigmatization, whereas blogs and forums are safe online havens that provide support against weight bias,” Chou summarizes. “Social media must therefore not be viewed simply as breeding grounds for weight stigma, but also as encouraging and supportive environments.”
Source: Springer
Photo: Instant Vantage
Some of the news that we find inspiring, diverting, wrong or so very right.
