disturbing

I was writing a post and at the end I was adding tags, as I do, and I typed the singular first person pronoun, I, and a list of tags popped up as suggestions that took me the fuck out. It was so disturbing I took a screenshot.

[image ID: a list of suggested tags, screenshotted. It's titled "popular" and the list is "I want to [star emoji]ve" "i wanna lose weight" "i sell content" "i love him"]

I wanna star-emoji-ve???? Well there's some pro-ana shit for you.

I don't know if the kids these days remember this but back in Livejournal around the era of strikethrough (the '07-'09 time period is where I remember noticing it) there was a movement to censor pro-self-harm blogs, that were support groups mostly supporting one another in more and more extreme anorexic/self-destructive/eating-disordered behaviors.

This is absolutely that. And they were like "it's self-expression" and everyone else in the world was like "it is actually a toxic encouragement of self-harm" because they were like, concretely instructing one another and recruiting vulnerable people to join them in ways to literally starve to death, they were support groups for killing yourself more or less, and so those tags would occasionally get banned or delisted or removed from search or whatever, but remember this was very early in the history of such things, and there was no algorithm. But people did use the browsing of blogs' "interests" to find one another, it was a feature of how Livejournal worked, and there wasn't a lot of moderation but the deactivation or delisting of those self-harm-encouraging tags were a hotly-contested bit of debate.

And so they got more creative, and found other ways to find one another, and people starved to death or otherwise irreparably damaged their bodies and their mental health and so on. I cannot emphasize enough, this was not fiction. These were not fictional stories depicting fictional scenarios that weren't happening, these were real people posting stories and encouragement and photographs of their real selves, showing off how much damage to themselves they were doing, concretely encouraging one another to do the same. This was not fiction.

But they kept finding new ways to talk about it so it couldn't be censored.

And then LJ deleted blogs for posting about fiction instead, and we all kind of forgot about it and moved on.

Highly displeased to find that it's all alive and well on Tumblr, to the point that it's the number one suggestion when I type the fucking first-person pronoun into the tag field, and I can't opt out of seeing that. COOL.