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9/4: CBS News 24/7 Episode 2
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YouTube algorithms consistently push eating disorder and self-harm content to teen girls, new study finds
Anna Mockel was 14 and suddenly obsessed with losing weight. It was spring 2020, and she had just graduated eighth grade remotely. Housebound and nervous about the transition to high school that coming fall, she sacrificed innumerable hours that COVID lockdown summer shuffling between social media apps.
Anna spent a lot of time on YouTube “not searching for anything in particular,” just watching what popped up in her feed. She remembers the spiraling thoughts started when she’d watch videos featuring girls who were a bit older and invariably skinny. The more Anna watched, the more these videos would clog her feed, and the more determined she was to look like the girls in the videos.
As she clicked and tapped, YouTube’s “Up Next” panel of recommended videos started morphing from content featuring skinny girls to “how-tos” on losing weight. Diet and exercise videos began to dominate Anna’s account. As she kept watching, she says, the content intensified, until her feed was flooded with videos glorifying skeletal-looking bodies and hacks for sustaining a 500-calorie daily diet. (Adolescent girls are recommended 2,200 in daily caloric intake.)
“I didn’t know that that was even a thing online,” Anna says of the eating disorder content recommended to her. “A lot of it just came up in my feed, and then I gravitated towards that because it’s what was already going on for me.”
Anna copied what she saw, restricted her diet and began losing weight at an alarming pace. At 14, she says that she was aware of eating disorders but “didn’t connect the dots” until she was diagnosed with anorexia. Over the next years, she would endure two hospitalizations and spend three months at a residential treatment center before beginning her recovery at age 16.
Now 18 and a high school senior, she asserts that social media, YouTube in particular, perpetuated her eating disorder.
“YouTube became this community of people who are competitive with eating disorders,” she says. “And it kept me in the mindset that [anorexia] wasn’t a problem because so many other people online were doing the same thing.”
Now, new research confirms this content was served to Anna intentionally. A report released Tuesday by the Center for Countering Digital Hate asserts that when YouTube users demonstrate signs of being interested in diet and weight loss, almost 70% of the videos pushed by the platform’s algorithms recommend content that likely worsens or creates anxieties about body image.
What’s more, the videos average 344,000 views each—nearly 60 times that of the average YouTube video—and come embroidered with ads from major brands like Nike, T-Mobile and Grammarly. It’s unclear whether the companies are aware of the ad placements.
“We cannot continue to let social media platforms experiment on new generations as they come of age,” says James P. Steyer, Founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit dedicated to educating families about online safety.
He says these platforms are designed to keep viewers’ attention even if that means amplifying harmful content to minors.
The report, titled “YouTube’s Anorexia Algorithm,” examines the first 1,000 videos that a teen girl would receive in the “Up Next” panel when watching videos about weight loss, diet or exercise for the first time.
To collect the data, CCDH’s researchers created a YouTube profile of a 13-year-old girl and carried out 100 searches on the video-sharing platform using popular eating disorder keywords such as “ED WIEIAD” (eating disorder, what I eat in a day), “ABC diet” (anorexia boot camp diet) and “safe foods” (a reference to foods with few or no calories). The research team then analyzed the top 10 recommendations YouTube’s algorithm pushed to the “Up Next” panel.
The results indicated that almost two-thirds (638) of the recommended videos pushed the hypothetical 13-year-old user further into eating disorder or problematic weight loss content; one-third (344) of YouTube’s recommendations were deemed harmful by the CCDH, meaning the content either promoted or glamorized eating disorders, contained weight-based bullying or showed imitable behavior; 50 of the videos, the study found, involved self-harm or suicide content.
“There’s this anti-human culture created by social media platforms like YouTube,” says Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate. “Kids today are essentially reeducated by algorithms, by companies teaching and persuading them to starve themselves.”
Ahmed says the study illustrates the systemic nature of the issue, that YouTube, owned by Google, is violating its own policies by allowing this content on the platform.
YouTube is the most popular social media site among teens in the US, ahead of TikTok and Instagram, according to Pew Research Center. Three quarters of U.S. teens say they use the platform at least once a day. YouTube does not require a user to create an account to view content.
The Social Media Victims Law Center, a Seattle-based law firm founded in response to the 2021 Facebook Papers, has filed thousands of lawsuits against social media companies, including YouTube. More than 20 of those suits allege that YouTube is designed to be intentionally addictive and perpetuate eating disorders in its users, particularly among teen girls.
The law firm connected 60 Minutes with a 17-year-old client. Her experience mirrors that of Anna.
“YouTube taught me how to have an eating disorder,” says the 17-year-old, whose lawsuit accuses YouTube of knowingly perpetuating anorexia. She says she created a YouTube account when she was 12. She’d log on to watch dog videos and gymnastics challenges and cooking tutorials. Then, she says, she started seeing videos of girls dancing and exercising. She’d click. YouTube recommended more videos of girls doing more extreme exercises, which turned into videos of diets and weight loss. She kept watching; she kept clicking.
She says her feed became a funnel for eating disorder content, a stream of influencers promoting extreme diets and ways to “stay skinny.” She spent five hours a day on YouTube, learning terms like “bulimia” and “ARFID” (Avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder). She learned what it meant to “purge” and “restrict” food; she became deeply concerned about caloric intake and her BMI (body mass index.)
When she was in seventh grade, she stopped eating. She was diagnosed with anorexia shortly after, and over the next five years, she says she’d spend more time out of school than in it. Now a junior in high school, she’s been hospitalized five times and spent months at three residential treatment centers trying to recover from the eating disorder.
“It’s just taken my life away pretty much,” she reflects.
Asked why algorithms are employed not to protect young users but to intentionally recommend eating disorder content, YouTube declined to comment.
The video sharing site says it “continually works with mental health experts to refine [its] approach to content recommendations for teens.” In April 2023, the platform expanded its policies on eating disorders and self-harm content, adding the ability to age restrict videos that contain “educational, documentary, scientific or artistic” disordered eating or that discuss “details which may be triggering to at-risk viewers.” Under this policy, these videos may be unavailable to viewers under 18.
YouTube has taken steps to block certain search terms like “thinspiration,” a word used to find footage of emaciated bodies. However, the CCDH study found that such videos still appear in the “Up Next” panel. And users learn that by subbing in a zero for the letter “O” or an exclamation point for the letter “I,” these terms are still searchable on YouTube. One video noted in the report as glorifying skeletal body shapes had 1.1 million views at the time of the analysis; it now has 1.6 million.
As part of the research, CCDH flagged 100 YouTube videos promoting eating disorders, weight-based bullying or showing imitable behavior. YouTube removed or age-restricted only 18 of those videos.
CBS News
U.S. “fondness for tall SUVs and pickups” compounding risks for pedestrians in crashes, IIHS study finds
Researchers at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety who looked back at data on more than 200 vehicle-pedestrian crashes in the U.S. say Americans’ preference for large, tall vehicles is compounding the risks of serious injury to pedestrians associated with higher-speed crashes. The authors of the IIHS study conclude that the size of many American vehicles means serious pedestrian injuries are more likely in crashes when compared to the expected risks on the roads in Europe, where vehicles are generally smaller.
IIHS researchers analyzed 202 crashes involving a vehicle and at least one pedestrian aged 16 or older between 2015 and 2022 in four states, “to generate an estimate for the link between injury outcomes and impact speed,” with information about the front-end height of the vehicles being used additionally “to examine the moderating effect of” the vehicle’s size on the outcome for the pedestrians.
“A small increase in crash speed can really ramp up the danger to a pedestrian. Our fondness for tall SUVs and pickups in the U.S. has intensified that effect,” IIHS President David Harkey was quoted as saying about the study’s findings.
While it was already understood that more speed at the point of impact increases risks to pedestrians struck by vehicles, the IIHS said the new study was carried out to provide, “an updated estimate of pedestrian injury risk at different severity levels” based on the evolving design of vehicles on U.S. roads today.
“As expected, impact speed strongly predicted injury risk, and hood leading edge height significantly increased the risk of pedestrian injury overall as well as the potency of impact speed for serious injuries,” the IIHS said.
While the study found no significant change in risk to pedestrians based on the weight of the vehicles involved, the IIHS said that, “in general, higher vehicle front ends increased the likelihood of both moderate and serious pedestrian injuries.”
For example, it said that when a median-height pickup, with a front end about 13 inches higher than most cars, hits a pedestrian at 27 mph, there’s a 83% chance of moderate injury and a 62% chance of serious injury, compared to 60% and a 30% respectively if the vehicle involved in the crash is a median-height car.
“Although SUVs are a growing share of the market in Europe, the passenger vehicle fleet there has long been dominated by cars. In contrast, the majority of passenger vehicles on U.S. roads today are SUVs or pickups,” IIHS senior statistician Sam Monfort, the lead author of the study, was quoted as saying by the institute. “These choices have very real consequences for pedestrian safety.”
“Speed increases have a more pronounced effect when taller vehicles are involved” in a crash, the organization said. “For example, as crash speed increases from 15 mph to 35 mph, the risk of a serious injury goes from 9% to 52% when a median-height car is involved. With a median [height] pickup, the risk shoots up from 11% to 91%.”
Previous research by the IIHS published in 2022 found that drivers of bigger vehicles were more likely to hit pedestrians while making turns than drivers of cars, and another IIHS study published last year that pickups, SUVs and vans with hoods higher than 40 inches at the front edge were about 45% more likely to cause pedestrian fatalities in crashes than cars and other vehicles with lower, sloping hoods.
Despite the concern over the impact of larger vehicles in U.S. pedestrian crashes, however, data showed 2023 saw the first overall year-on-year decline in pedestrian deaths from vehicle accidents in about four years, since the COVID-19 pandemic. The number of pedestrians killed on U.S. roads in 2023 dropped 5.4% compared to the previous year — which saw a 40-year high — but it was still 14.1% higher than the number of deaths recorded in 2019, before the pandemic, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association.
CBS News
Evacuations ordered as large brush fire breaks out in Malibu in the midst of red flag warnings
A large brush fire is burning in Malibu Canyon near Pepperdine University, prompting some evacuations for residents.
The blaze, dubbed the Franklin Fire, was first reported a little after 10:45 p.m. near S. Malibu Canyon Road and Station Boundary just south of the Piuma area, according to the Los Angeles County Fire Department.
As of 11:45 p.m., crews reported that the fire had already engulfed about 100 acres. While there were no structures damaged, some were threatened, according to firefighters.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputies were working to evacuate residents living in zone MAL-C112, which includes the area east of Malibu Canyon Road and South of Piuma Road as well as the Serra Retreat. More information on evacuations is available on the Malibu city website.
Multiple water-dropping aircraft were called to the scene as crews deemed the blaze a Third Alarm incident.
It’s unclear how the fire started.
California Highway Patrol officers closed Malibu Canyon from Mulholland Drive to Pacific Coast Highway as the firefight continued.
Pepperdine school officials released a statement to note that they were closely monitoring the fire.
“The fire is not currently affecting any University campus,” the statement said. “The Malibu Campus and local area may experience some power outages related to this incident.”
Weather officials raised concerns over fire danger that would impact most of Southern California to start the way. Unusually low humidity paired with a powerful Santa Ana winds movement created dangerous conditions, which led them to issue a “particularly dangerous situation red flag warning.”
In response, SoCal Edison has already warned tens of thousands of residents living throughout Los Angeles County that their service may be shut off if the winds intensify.
Conditions bore similarities to the weather when the Mountain Fire erupted in Ventura County in early November. That blaze torched nearly 20,000 acres and destroyed more than 200 structures.
This is a developing story. Check back for details.