My body is never just mine.
The body enters the net and stays caught in it like prey. Every banned term is reborn, mutated. Moderation gives chase; it never catches up.
Online, illness has been given a friendlier face. In corners of social media, anorexia and bulimia are personified as companions — Ana and Mia — and offered not as diseases but as a lifestyle, even an identity.
Inside these spaces, some figures cast themselves as coaches. They promise to guide others — very often young girls — toward extreme weight loss. The care is performed; the outcome is harm. The pattern is grooming: attention, belonging, secrecy, and a slow wall built between the person and everyone who loves them.
The vocabulary mutates on purpose. A tag gets banned and is reborn, slightly altered — faster than moderation can follow. On Instagram, 17 banned terms became hundreds of variants, around forty each, and the variants drew 15–30% more likes and comments than the originals. The platforms both host this world and partly hide it: research access to their data is throttled and stripped of context. So any map of it is, by design, incomplete. That incompleteness is not a flaw in this work — it is its subject.
Eating disorders carry among the highest mortality of any mental illness. They are often cited, on WHO figures, as the second cause of death among adolescent girls, after road accidents. Behind every mutating tag is a body at risk.
You will not catch this by hunting for a hashtag — the words keep changing. Watch instead for the shape of it: withdrawal, secrecy around eating, rigid rituals, distress or anger when the subject is raised, a new and guarded online world. Don't wait for certainty. Ask, stay close, and reach for specialist help early. The Exit tab lists where to turn, in several countries.
No open source measures this phenomenon in real time. The platforms hold that data, and do not release it. So this piece does not invent a live feed: the figures it shows come from published research and independent investigations, each with its source, platform and period. The animation of the net is a representation; the numbers are not.
It never reproduces the methods, the numbers, or the coded terms it points at. To display them would be to spread them. It shows the machine, not the manual.
You cannot hate the matter and love the form.Louise Glück · Archaic Fragment · Poetry, January 2006
The net does not grow in the wild. It grows on rented land. The platforms are not the backdrop of this story — they host it, feed it, and cash it. Moderation chases. The algorithm serves. The same company signs both.
TikTok · new accounts set up as 13-year-olds in the US, UK, Canada and Australia · CCDH, December 2022
Instagram · the pro–eating-disorder "bubble" · Fairplay, Designing for Disorder, April 2022
Meta · internal research leaked to the Wall Street Journal, September 2021 · independent testing of Instagram Teen Accounts, September 2025
Fairplay's estimate of Meta's yearly advertising revenue · April 2022
The cat never catches the mouse.
The cat rents the house to it.
A demonstration of the grooming grammar. Every line is a tactic — shown, then stripped bare. No advice is given here; none exists. What you are watching is how the voice hooks — never what it tells anyone to do.
The net can be left. If you or someone you love is facing this, here are human voices — most free, all confidential. You don't need a diagnosis to reach out.