Will Pinterest's Ban on Pins Showing Self-Destructive Behavior Work for Twitter?
Love Pinterest? Posting photos of yourself, friends and sharing phenomenal stuff there? If you're like me you are. But did you know there is a limit to what you can share on Pinterest? And when you hear what it is, you probably will agree, unless you are a size zero and are looking to lose more weight so you can wear a thong and not see any curve line around your bony hip.
It's official. On April 6th, next Friday, Pinterest will ban pins that encourage self-abuse and potentially foreshadow self-harm. The warning ban refers to anorexics and the waifs who revel in the "youthful and glorious" trend of appearing invisibly thin enough to segueway into a Harry Potter movie without anyone noticing. Now that's slender! The hugely popular website took a stand in its announcement via e-mail to it members last Friday.
Pinterest is to be credited with its concern for young women and young girls who often use social media sites to encourage each other toward "measured" eating and weight loss in a conspiratorial and secret union. I myself have bumped up inadvertently on such groups, including anorexics and bulimics on Twitter. Curious, I examined some tweets. Scary, folks, scary!
On Pinterest there is the trend of girls pinning uber competitive "mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the thinnest one of all" images of themselves or others. These “thinspiration” boards are created with pictures of skeletal women whose skin has been so tightly drawn against their pelvic bones, ribs and elbows they remind me of the army of bones that Sinbad fought in that film of the Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, except the skeletons would need some strands of hair to show their female gender. Next to the Pinterest pin boards of these "lovelies without any semblance of a curve" are the posts to promote weight loss. For example one reads, “Sweat is fat crying.” Another reads, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” Usually the font is such a disconnect with the message; it looks like one that you would identify on a 10-year-old girl's birthday card.
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