“What makes a pro eating disorder hashtag”: Using hashtags to identify pro eating disorder tumblr posts and Twitter users

Eating disorders are detrimental to emotional and physical health conditions. The proliferation of content promoting eating disorders (pro-ED) on social media is a concerning trend that has received attention in recent years. On popular social network websites such as Tumblr and Twitter, there exist online pro-ED communities that focus on having eating disorder as a lifestyle choice as opposed to psychiatric illness. In this paper, we used hashtags to develop two well-trained classifiers: one identifies pro-ED Tumbler posts, and the other identifies pro-ED Twitter users. We also compared pro-ED hashtags across these two networks.