Why eating disorder content is all over the internet

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 0:29Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 0:43Speaker 02

  You know who is a really good freak entering the canon? Will Blunderfield is my favorite freak.

• 0:49Ryan Broderick?

  Who's that?

• 0:50Speaker 02

  You've definitely seen him before.

• 0:52Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, the, oh, the, the drinking, the drinking pee guy.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's, he's a-

• 0:57Ryan Broderick?

  I love this guy.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  This 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 he's, his whole thing is like using really gross like, like language to describe like his dick and balls and also like his content is heavily homoerotic.

• 1:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  Like even more so than the usual like spiritual manosphere influencer. He's a very good internet freak, I would say.

• 1:44Ryan Broderick?

  His videos are very, like they're filmed like inspirational content too, which I really appreciate. Like he, he's really fired up about like drinking his own pee and whatever. So like, I think that's great. I ask you that though, because you and I, 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 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 for the, for, in a big way. So joining us is EJ Dixon of New York Mag's The Cut. You wrote about this new era of eating disorder content,

• 2:29Ryan Broderick?

  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 is our producer, Grant Irving. Sometimes I 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 drumbeats of our show has been like protecting children online. It's something that we've accused politicians of only doing performatively.

• 3:14Ryan Broderick?

  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?

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Oh, it's 100% become more normalized. It's 100% 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 proAnna or promia, which is the pro bulimia 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-

• 3:53Ryan Broderick?

  I'm shocked that that happened. I'm absolutely shocked that Elon Musk made something worse online.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  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 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-

• 4:23Speaker 02

  It's encouraged in some ways.

• 4:26Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  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.

• 4:53Ryan Broderick?

  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, childisexual abuse material, as like these things that when social media turns on in late 2000s, early 2010s, all of a sudden, we can see it. It's like, it's like come out of the fringe 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 eating disorder content where like, I was a big, I still am a big Tumblr user, and I remember in the early 2010s,

• 5:34Ryan Broderick?

  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...

• 5:42Speaker 02

  You had to try it.

• 5:43Ryan Broderick?

  You'd have to look for it, yeah.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:44Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:55Ryan Broderick?

  And come back in a way where like the companies in charge just do not care. And they're not, they don't even really pretend to care like they used to.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  And just how quickly it happened, like, I totally agree with you. That's, 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.

• 6:19Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  This isn't a problem, like, look, 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.

• 6:30Ryan Broderick?

  We wanted to kind of get a better sense of like what the, the online history of ED content looked like. And so we sent our researcher Adam down the rabbit hole to, to sort of find the earliest examples we could find of like

• 6:43Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 6:43Ryan Broderick?

  platforms dealing with this, not, 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. It's like the first memes start to appear 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 400 websites." Oh wow, 400 websites.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  How did they report that?

• 7:15Ryan Broderick?

  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, "It's 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.

• 7:57Ryan Broderick?

  In 2003, a statistical review of pro-anorexia websites yields some pretty interesting results. So it finds that there are 500 pro-anno 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.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  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 Liv Schmidt does.

• 8:54Ryan Broderick?

  Right. Liv 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 censors, 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 upfront 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

• 9:39Ryan Broderick?

  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 a reference to like web surfing. "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 sane to do with your time. Thank you. Click to enter my world."

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 10:18Ryan Broderick?

  And then the paper also reads, eating disorders are dan-- 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.

• 10:50Speaker 02

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

• 11:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:45Ryan Broderick?

  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 offered?

• 12:05Speaker 02

  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 ED content problem, if I remember correctly. But yeah, I mean, I think it was a demographic. The people who use Tumblr were different than the people who use like Twitter or Snapchat. You know, these were like dark, brooding, 15-year-old, 15-year-old girls who like read Sylvia Plath and drank coffee.

• 12:32Ryan Broderick?

  Smoked cigarettes, yeah.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was pretty much like ideally tailored for that demographic.

• 12:39Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  Remind the listeners what the thigh gap discourse was?

• 12:58Ryan Broderick?

  So the definition is that your thighs shouldn't touch when you stand straight up, kind of like 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.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:34Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, that sounds right. Hot Dog Legs, I feel like was like 2014.

• 13:51Ryan Broderick?

  Summer 2013, yeah.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  Sick, yeah.

• 13:55Ryan Broderick?

  So, yeah, because like, Hot Dog Leg, Hot Dog, we both have used our brains really well over the last...

• 14:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's literally exactly what I was just thinking.

• 14:06Ryan Broderick?

  Yep, great. No, but like, Hot Dog Legs to me is like, one of the first big 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.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  There were a lot of like, concerned trolling op-eds. 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 was 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. It's same wine bottles, new labels.

• 15:00Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, do you, 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.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 15:30Ryan Broderick?

  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, 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 Anna community, she explains. Some people have better self-control, but once the disorder gets you, it's hard to stay away. There are pro Anna images everywhere if you want to find them. I guess like what I'm wondering is like, does it work the same way?

• 16:15Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, I've experienced it firsthand. My for you page, because of me doing the story, is entirely pro Anna content now. And I remember talking to TikTok about this. Their sort of defense for the fact that people's that I would that 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?

• 17:03Speaker 02

  Soulless, I guess, for lack of a better term, that that they just keep on feeding content to like vulnerable people? It's, um, it's crazy that she thought that was a solid defense.

• 17:16Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, this is around the same time, a lot of these sites start experimenting with time on site metrics. So they're, 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. Uh, and there's a couple of posts the study captured. So one reads, it's just a fat girl trying to get 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.

• 18:02Ryan Broderick?

  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 hiding from each other while trying to find each other. I mean, it seems like the dynamic that's still playing out now.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 18:14Ryan Broderick?

  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?

• 18:33Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's always existed to some degree or another. I mean, I remember being on ED Twitter and there being sort of like micro celebrities that like everybody in 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 hijack the language of female empowerment to package their material. That's kind of the thing that I think is new about this. That's not something that I really saw on ED Twitter or ED Tumblr.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  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 Liv Schmidt 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, we're to take your diet into your into your own hands. Like, being thin is empowering. That is a very subtle shift. But I think it's it had tremendous impact because they gave themselves plausible deniability. Right? Like, Liz Schmidt'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.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 20:29Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 20:44Speaker 00

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• 21:45Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  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 wildly overweight, I think, but it was the heaviest that she had 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.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  And that's how she found Liv Schmidt.

• 22:39Ryan Broderick?

  How'd she become so popular?

• 22:42Speaker 02

  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 two folds. I was horrified. It reminded me a lot of the stuff I had seen on EG Tumblr 10, 15 years ago. And frankly, I also thought it was pretty smart.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  I thought...

• 23:24Ryan Broderick?

  Like, from a content perspective?

• 23:26Speaker 02

  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 candlelight Pilates and drink matcha and..."

• 23:53Ryan Broderick?

  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 spo 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 years since. So like, how would you sort of describe where Liv Schmidt fits into the ecosystem, the larger ecosystem, of like, eating disorder content?

• 24:40Speaker 02

  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 thin spo side. But it's like very thinly veiled thin spo, 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, elevating slimness into like, an aesthetic unto itself. Like, it's a way of life. It's not even just about like, losing weight or being thin.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  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.

• 25:41Ryan Broderick?

  These ladies love piazzas. They love piazzas in Rome. All the videos I've seen are like, Aperol spritzes and like, not eating in Italy. Which I think is an insane idea, to go to Italy and not eat food, personally.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  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 off her lifestyle, where she's like grabbing matcha in Soho, or she's just like, standing there in an aloe yoga set and like, a millionaire comes by in his Rolls Royce to like, ask for her number. Like, it's very aspirational content for a certain type of young woman.

• 26:28Ryan Broderick?

  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, like, if you follow these sort of like, toxic gender ideologies 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?

• 26:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think so. I mean, it's very much like, pro and a Tumblr 2.0. Like, the visual language on Tumblr was very, very similar, right? Uh, 10 years ago, it was like, you know, photos of Audrey Hepburn, or like, close-ups of jutting collarbones, or 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.

• 27:27Ryan Broderick?

  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, uh, any kind of ban, but I think it's a really good example of how manipulative a lot of this stuff can be.

• 27:46Speaker 05

  You don't get [BLEEP] by fearing food. You get [BLEEP] 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 waist 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.

• 28:21Ryan Broderick?

  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 redacts it, "without shame, and how to actually eat like a naturally thin woman. Everyone is over-complicating weight loss like it's a nuclear code. Keto, carnivore, carbs, 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 women in the world aren't doing any of that, they're just not

• 29:03Ryan Broderick?

  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, like, that's... Almost exactly how like people 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 I would have seen on Tumblr like 15 years ago where it was like it felt more. I felt less polished, maybe?

• 29:39Speaker 02

  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.

• 29:48Ryan Broderick?

  For sure.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  It borrows more from the language of like the wellness industry and 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 Pro Anna Tumblr. And, you know, it was basically the same.

• 30:07Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  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 to a listener who finds this content?

• 30:25Ryan Broderick?

  For this exercise, let's group like ED internet in with like other forms of extremism, which 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 QAnon people like at some point in the last like five to 10 years, a lot of the influencers in these spaces started to talk like self-help gurus. And they use the language of like self-help and you know, 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 grifter.

• 31:11Ryan Broderick?

  EJ is nodding. I just want to point out that if you're just watching. Both EJ and Grant are both nodding enthusiastically that we have to kill all life coaches. Um, 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.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  I would have bought a bottle of heroin at a carnival in 1910.

• 31:28Ryan Broderick?

  Hundred percent. Like, oh my god. Taking medicinal cocaine and watching like a 12 second short film that I thought was real in a tent somewhere.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  It blows your mind.

• 31:38Ryan Broderick?

  Get me out of here. Like, unbelievable.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  In reporting this, like, I was really struck by how a lot of the language that she used was very similar to Keith Raniere, the guy who ran Nexium.

• 31:49Ryan Broderick?

  Totally.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  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 the Nexium that didn't get a lot of attention was that he put a lot of emphasis on weight loss. Like, and on weight loss and skinniness is like exemplary of empowerment and self-discipline and, 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, to these women. Like, that said a lot to me.

• 32:32Ryan Broderick?

  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, 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 any external help with. Like, that to me is always a red flag of just like, this person is, is a, is a con artist at best.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just so-

• 33:16Ryan Broderick?

  Except for us. If you give us $5 a month, we will help you live your best life, uh, here at Panic World.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  Patreon.com slash-

• 33:23Ryan Broderick?

  Patreon.com slash- Okay, uh, anyways, uh, let's get back to Liv and how she's monetizing and updating something this awful. So, uh, she once reposted a TikTok 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 weigh-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's chic.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  Essentially like glamorizing having an eating disorder. I mean, it was the same on Pro and a Tumblr 10, 15 years ago. Like, I remember being on those blogs and you wouldn't see anything about like 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 is 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 2010s, so like,

• 34:40Speaker 02

  standing over some like emo guy, like black and white in 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.

• 34:51Ryan Broderick?

  A lot of owls, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, 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?

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, she offered this subscription service called, uh, the Skinny Society with an accent-

• 35:13Ryan Broderick?

  Jesus Christ, okay.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  An accent e-gul over, um, the last e.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  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,

• 36:01Speaker 02

  that they were just pro in a forums in a different, in a different form.

• 36:06Speaker 03

  Did any of the group chat conversations surprise you in any way?

• 36:12Speaker 02

  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, 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,

• 36:53Speaker 02

  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 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."

• 37:33Speaker 03

  I like, I really cannot imagine that, like. Uh, when I was at my most depressed, it was like four people I love being like, "You sound fucked up."

• 37:44Ryan Broderick?

  That was right before we met.

• 37:45Speaker 03

  True. Ryan solved everything.

• 37:47Ryan Broderick?

  But I solved everything.

• 37:48Speaker 03

  But I just like.

• 37:49Ryan Broderick?

  He pays me $5 a month that I help him through his depression.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  No, no, just like, just if you imagine, like, if I imagined 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 gotta listen to that. And it just like, imagining that you had the exact opposite impulse, impulses, um, like, voices in your, in your head, I don't know how you combat that.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can't. I mean, that's what cults do. That's like one of the primary tenets of cults is that they realign your moral compass. So 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. Um, and to a certain extent, that's what Liv Schmidt's Skinny Society, I think, did. I mean, I saw it every day. People would say, people would say shit like that every day. Like, my friend is, is concerned for me. My parents are worried that I'm not eating. Uh, what should I do? What should I tell them? And nobody, not, not one person said, "Well, maybe you should listen to your parents." They all uniformly said, "Don't worry, like, they're, they're just hating because

• 39:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 39:12Ryan Broderick?

  And you, you write in your piece, uh, "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, uh, which I, I, Instagram DMs. I, I love to hear like how they function. Like, what did you see in there?

• 39:46Speaker 02

  You pay for the service and then you have the choice to join. You're only supposed to join one. I joined all 20, 21 of them, however many there were at the time.

• 39:55Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, dear God. Okay.

• 39:56Speaker 02

  Uh, 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. Um, 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

• 40:37Speaker 02

  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 a, 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 hacks for like, oh, you should use mouth tape so you don't like snack at night, or you should take prunes, uh, because they essentially have like a laxative effect. So essentially, you know, like advising people on how to purge, like in real time.

• 41:21Ryan Broderick?

  I ate too many prunes during COVID once, and it was a bad, it was a bad time for me. Um, do you have a sense of like who are in these groups?

• 41:30Speaker 02

  It's a range. Initially, I thought it was gonna be very young women, like women around lives age. But it is definitely a range. Uh, there are women in their 40s, 50s, moms. There's a whole group that it, there was a whole group dedicated to moms. But I do feel like it did skew slightly younger. Um, 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.

• 42:04Ryan Broderick?

  Oh god, okay.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it was, there were a lot of very young girls in there for sure.

• 42:09Ryan Broderick?

  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 2010s kind of question of like content moderation. This feels, it feels harder to knock down in a way.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I can tell you what my impression talking to Instagram was while reporting out the story and 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.

• 42:33Ryan Broderick?

  Shocking that 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 were those conversations going?

• 42:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was actually more extensive than that. It was, we're looking into it, and then it was, and I, and I sent a couple of 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 banning this type of content. But clearly, it's not that clear because the, the stuff that Liv is posting on a daily basis about, you know, eating 1,000 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 of posts and they were like, we took down those posts.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  But I was like, okay, what's happening? That's great, but like, what are you gonna do with like the account? Or what are you gonna 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, we're looking into it. And I, and I sent them, I told them explicitly, like, I went through the, um, this is kind of boring, like, reporting step by step. I don't know how interesting you're gonna find this.

• 43:58Ryan Broderick?

  Nope, it's super interesting.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I wanted to know if I could verify that some of 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...

• 44:15Speaker 02

  I can't do math like I'll say like 8,000 members. Okay.

• 44:18Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  I'll like estimate of the 8,000 members like and of the people who use their phone 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.

• 44:58Ryan Broderick?

  They love to wait. And so I genuinely wonder if like tech companies get like a sick thrill 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.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  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, 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.

• 45:37Ryan Broderick?

  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.

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• 46:49Ryan Broderick?

  You've mentioned a few times like throughout this episode, like your own experiences with, you know, ED internet, like did, was there like a personal toll to reporting on Liv 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?

• 47:11Speaker 02

  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 have been-

• 47:20Ryan Broderick?

  Human therapy, right? Not chat GPT?

• 47:23Speaker 02

  The fact that you have to specify is 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 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, 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, I just could not, like, within probably a few hours, I started just constantly like

• 48:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 48:32Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  It was probably in some ways the most traumatizing, not traumatizing, traumatizing is the wrong word.

• 48:43Ryan Broderick?

  Like triggering?

• 48:44Speaker 02

  I guess, I hate that word.

• 48:46Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, me too. It's lame, but like, it is useful.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  Triggering, yes, I guess. It was, it was in some ways the most triggering story I've ever done.

• 48:54Ryan Broderick?

  Did you, I, I, I assume you were sort of like lurking in these groups, right? Like, I don't, you weren't participating or anything, right?

• 49:00Speaker 02

  No, I wasn't participating, but I was, I was lurking, 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.

• 49:21Ryan Broderick?

  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, I figured.

• 49:28Speaker 02

  Constantly. It was constant. I'm a mom. I'm, 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. Um, 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, I just wanted to be like, get help, you know, like, talk to somebody, talk to, talk to somebody about this. Talk to your parents, talk to a therapist. This is putting on mouth tape so you don't eat after 6pm? That's fucking nuts.

• 50:05Ryan Broderick?

  Also, like, are you just not gonna talk for like four or five hours before going to bed? Like?

• 50:09Speaker 02

  I guess so.

• 50:10Ryan Broderick?

  I guess. Like, but that just seems, it seems, I, I feel like you're just gonna be taking the tape off a lot. Like, yeah, I, I don't know. I, okay, actually, there's 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? Like?

• 50:31Speaker 02

  No, they're doing it.

• 50:32Ryan Broderick?

  All right, so, okay.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  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.

• 50:46Ryan Broderick?

  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, you know, since your piece came out, around some of these spaces, some of these people?

• 51:07Speaker 02

  Meta demonetized Liv immediately after the story came out. They did not deplatform 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-

• 51:22Ryan Broderick?

  A subscription service hosted by Instagram.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  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,

• 52:07Speaker 02

  minors to starve themselves. I think Instagram probably should have done it before the story came out.

• 52:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 52:13Speaker 03

  Was there any response about you particularly flagging, like, you have people under the age of 18 doing this?

• 52:20Speaker 02

  No, we sent a whole list of questions. We heard not a peep, until she went on a rampage on her Instagram stories.

• 52:28Ryan Broderick?

  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, Evy, 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-

• 52:52Ryan Broderick?

  Is trying to align themselves with like some of the worst stuff on the internet and putting it under the banner of conservatism.

• 53:00Speaker 02

  It's so funny, yeah. They just put themselves in pretzels over it, yeah.

• 53:05Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  Go on, sorry.

• 53:07Ryan Broderick?

  It worries me that something like eating disorders, specifically for women, of course, although men, like conservative men have them too, they just call them like optimization or whatever, they're 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 actively harmful for people are now being embraced by conservative conservatives because it's, 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, it, it, it make, it like encodes it in like the DNA of our politics in a way that feels very new to me.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I guess in the case of Liv, like it's 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, the toxic body positivity movement, like she's

• 54:09Ryan Broderick?

  Right, exactly.

• 54:10Speaker 02

  She is prioritizing like actual like beauty and femininity and

• 54:15Ryan Broderick?

  Liv Schmidt's gonna kill Lizzo, yeah.

• 54:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. I was just gonna say, like, she's the anti-Lizzo.

• 54:21Ryan Broderick?

  Anti-Lizzo, yeah.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  Because Lizzo is like the height of relevance for them somehow, even though nobody on the left fucking cares about Lizzo.

• 54:29Ryan Broderick?

  They're stuck in 24, yeah. They watched one Dove ad for soap in 2015 and lost their minds, so yeah.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, that's, 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.

• 54:51Ryan Broderick?

  This is how women should look.

• 54:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, and femininity, yes, exactly. Um, and I see shades of that, um, all over social media on the right and, and that is, I, 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, I love a woman with like meat on her.

• 55:17Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 55:18Speaker 02

  Like this, this somewhat fat body type like, and there was huge backlash to that. So I do think that the fact that there is backlash to 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.

• 55:33Ryan Broderick?

  It is very hard to find something hopeful to end on in this episode because it is so gray and dark, but I, I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about the people that you interviewed who were able to leave Liv Schmidt's group because I feel like that's probably the, the most hopeful ray of sunshine we're going to get at the end of our episode today.

• 55:52Speaker 02

  I love that question, but honestly, my answer is like a little depressing.

• 55:56Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, that's, I look, I'm, I'm working with what I got. Like this is, this is the best I could do. So yeah, uh, anything you've got would be good.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  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 podcasts.

• 56:13Ryan Broderick?

  We've talked about snark subreddits before. Yeah. Um, I was, I was gonna, I was actually gonna ask if there was a Liv Schmidt snark subreddit because she feels ripe for one.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  Yes, there is. And there, there is, and there is a Liv Schmidt snark subreddit and there is an ED recovery snark subreddit.

• 56:29Ryan Broderick?

  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 Denspo influencers?

• 56:39Speaker 02

  Yes, correct.

• 56:40Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. Good. Okay. Good. Okay.

• 56:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:43Ryan Broderick?

  A little complicated.

• 56:44Speaker 02

  So I found a lot, 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, um, 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, I think in this case, like that's, that's a good thing, you know, that they're, that these people are becoming disillusioned with Liv's 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. Um, the first is that they were, they all tended to skew older, like my age, like in their thirties. or late twenties and like I said earlier, I think that lives

• 57:27Speaker 02

  uh fanbase tends to skew much younger than that. So it did make me wonder, are the eighteen nineteen twenty twenty one 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 who are waking up to it? So that was that was one thing that scared me. The other thing, and this was something um that I have thought about a lot um 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?

• 58:06Ryan Broderick?

  Interesting.

• 58:07Speaker 02

  Uh and they all thought that the message that she was peddling was really harmful and toxic and all that. None of them, none of them felt like it wasn't important to be thin. None of them felt

• 58:20Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, that's

• 58:22Speaker 02

  being thin was not their A1 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 Liv 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.

• 59:05Speaker 02

  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 Liv Schmidt's

• 59:20Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, eating disorder content is one of, is unique in that way.

• 59:26Ryan Broderick?

  Kind of impossible to get rid of. It will exist in the corners of whatever replaces the internet. I'm sure that someone is gonna build, if not already, a ChatGPT sort of style ED like coach, right? Like, this thing is always gonna 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?

• 59:57Speaker 02

  I think so. It's kind of a larger question, right? About like, whether or not deplatforming actually works?

• 1:00:03Ryan Broderick?

  It's something I go back and forth on all the time. I still don't really know.

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  I'm pretty positive that it does. And I think, like, Elon acquiring X is kind of a case study in that, right? Like, 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, deplatforming 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-a-mole in a lot of ways. But, I mean, you gotta keep whacking those moles. You gotta keep getting the bad actors down. You gotta keep working on it, or else, you know, there are gonna be ten new ones.

• 1:00:52Ryan Broderick?

  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 wanna 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 and was like, "Can you please invent Facebook? Like, you took on the responsibility, and then, you know, 15 years into it, you don't wanna deal with it anymore. Like, I don't know what to tell you, man. Like, you wanted to absorb all of human misery, and like, pump it back out to people. Like, that's the job."

• 1:01:25Speaker 02

  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, 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.

• 1:01:40Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 1:01:48Speaker 03

  How are you doing recovering from reporting on this?

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I feel kinda 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 Liv's 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.

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  So I actually felt like somewhat uniquely qualified to do to do this story for that reason. How am I doing? 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 this story was like problematic for me. And they were basically like, well, stop reporting out the story. And I was like, I can't. But yeah, I mean, the second that I was able to unfollow her, I did. And my life is definitely better because of it.

• 1:03:22Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:03:28Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, me too.

• 1:03:30Ryan Broderick?

  So I want to thank you for 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?

• 1:03:40Speaker 02

  I don't know. I'm on X. I'm on Instagram. I'm on the 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?

• 1:03:52Ryan Broderick?

  I just say Ryan hates this. And I feel like if you search that, I pop up.

• 1:03:56Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. You search JJ Dixon, you can find me and wherever. I wish I had like a better road answer for that.

• 1:04:05Ryan Broderick?

  Well, thank you again. This was this was great.

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:04:11Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fialsted 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. Mary Ann 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

• 1:04:49Ryan Broderick?

  at [email protected]. Lastly, here's my advice for you: chill out and touch grass while you still can.