Last month, Instagram joined Tumblr and Pinterest in taking a stand against pro-eating disorder content. Similar to the other major social networking platforms, they published new guidelines prohibiting users from sharing images that were found to be “encouraging or urging users to embrace anorexia, bulimia, or other eating disorders; or to cut, harm themselves, or commit suicide…”

This was a bold move by the photo-sharing service, which boasts over 100 million active users. Creating limitations on users is never popular, particularly with youth who use such applications as a means of unrestrained expression.

Perhaps not surprisingly, soon after Instagram announced the change, users created new hashtags to reference the pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia content (such as spelling “thinspo” as “thynspo”). While Instagram quickly caught up to the change, therein lies the rub. Censorship can often have deleterious effects. People don’t like to be told what not to do. Perhaps especially people who are already feeling depressed and outcasts of society.

So these disenchanted folks go further underground and get more creative. They feel more isolated, a well-known risk factor for nearly all mental health problems. And what we know about pro-eating disorder sites is that they are built and used out of a need for connection.

Not only that, but what are the implications of beginning to censor the internet? Where does freedom of speech fit in, even for those on the fringes?

On the other hand, not making a statement against this kind of content could feel like turning a blind eye to the kid cutting himself in the corner. These sites are like huge unregulated playgrounds with youth bullying each other and themselves. If they can step in and provide some safeguards, perhaps the rampant spread of self-harm can be slowed. And if even one life can be saved, might it not be worth implementing a few rules?

So what do you think? 

{via flickr creative commons: toodlepip}

We ll know the obvious question to be asked following news of a friend’s recent break-up. No, not “How are you holding up?” or even, “Rocky Road or Peanut Butter Chip?”

It’s, “Did you de-friend him yet?”

While some of us are gluttons for punishment, many new members to the Lonely Hearts Club recognize that they just don’t want to be faced daily with updates about their lost lover’s latest escapades. Photos of him with his hot new girlfriend drinking pina coladas in Riviera Maya? Hardly a self-esteem booster.

So we de-friend him. But what about all our other happily coupled Facebook friends? Are we ready to be faced with over-exposed photos of newly placed diamond rings or our cousin gushing about the romantic anniversary dinner her partner cooked up last night?

For some, social media like Facebook and Instagram can become a minefield of social comparison traps.

For the record, social comparison is a 100% normal human process. The theory, established in the 1950s by a psychologist named Leon Festinger, says that it’s a natural drive to try to establish accurate self-evaluations. To do this, we compare ourselves to others, either in an upward or downwards pattern.

Facebook and the like create the perfect platform for such comparison. We sometimes use our newsfeeds to help boost our own sense of achievement (“Look at all these bums taking the weekend off. I’m such a hard worker!”), while at other times it becomes a source of embarrassment or even shame (“Everyone has plans for Valentine’s Day except for me. Even my grandma!”).

Facebook doesn’t cause the problem in and of itself, but some of us are particularly vulnerable to such comparisons. If our self-esteem is already rocky, being faced with daily “reminders” of our inadequacies can be too much for our fragile sense of self to bear.

Technology doesn’t have to be all bad. If we can learn how to take in the information thrown at us on social media sites, we can sometimes preserve our self-esteem while still getting to partake in all of the great qualities of these sites — like an increased sense of connection and an exposure to new and interesting information.

Here are three tips to doing just that:

1. Remember that people post their greatest hits, not their blooper reel. While some friends do share their trials and tribulations with their whole Facebook networks, most of us avoid posting things that are truly embarrassing or distressing. Instead, we share our vacation photos, our successes at work, and our kids’ “adorable” (to us…) antics. We choose the photo that makes us look best, not the one with the crappy lighting where we look like we need a brow wax and to see the colorist. Keep in mind that the friend posting that photo likely chose between 20 similar ones. She didn’t look that great in the other 19.

2. Go ahead and hide that status. If you’re not ready to commit to the de-friend, it may be useful to utilize the hide function for those certain friends’ statuses. You know who they are. The ones that seem to have an endless supply of money, time, and joy. If it’s too much to revel in their constant paradise, you don’t have to. Hide their statuses and rest assured that if you feel up to commenting on their latest trip to Maui, you can visit their page.

3. Limit your online time. Facebook is a time-suck, no doubt. It’s easy to find yourself scrolling through hours of status updates with a blank stare and drool running down your mouth while simultaneously muttering about how much you hate this site. That might be your cue that it’s time to re-enter this other, pretty amazing world. It’s called reality. As much as the virtual world tries to imitate it, it’s not the same as actually living life. If you feel addicted (no joke, “facebook addiction” googled more often than “cigarette addiction”), try setting a daily time limit for yourself.

How do you manage to keep your social comparison and self-esteem in check when it comes to social media?

In the category with white chocolate M&Ms for things that I wish I had thought of first, MissRepresentation’s #NotBuyingIt app is one of the coolest things I’ve heard of recently. It joins the ranks of other apps I just love.

From the same folks that brought us that eye-opening film a couple years ago comes an app that brings media literacy to your finger tips.

The #NotBuyingIt idea was first made popular as simply a hashtag on Twitter. PolicyMic reports that the hashtag accompanied over 10,000 tweets during this year’s Super Bowl and reached almost four million people. The app takes that kind of grassroots consumer power to the next level.

The app combines the power of social media (Twitter, namely) as a higher tech “complaint department.” Users of the app can slap “#NotBuyingIt” onto an ad that they find offensive or degrading and let the company using the ad know how they feel. The app also allows mapping of where the most offensive ads are originating and which communities are taking the biggest stand.

The app is still in development and the creators are working to raise money to make it available. If it’s something you want to support, check out the fundraising page.

Living in a culture that treats thinness as it’s the golden ticket to all things happy and wonderful, it’s not hard to understand why millions of people flock to the latest diet trends. In our society,  achieving a certain body can seem to become almost a matter of survival. And pursuing survival leads people to do all sorts of irrational things.

The tricky thing is that those irrational ideas don’t seem quite so crazy when we’re in the midst of them. In fact, they seem like the most rational and necessary behaviors in the world. Think about a relationship that you’ve had where you can now look back with the perspective that time and distance provides. There are undoubtedly things that you did, maybe at the beginning or end of said relationship, that you recognize now as ridiculous. Standing outside your lover’s window at late at night holding up a radio playing a Peter Gabriel song, for instance?

Likewise, the drive for thinness can leads us down paths that are silly and ineffective at best, and dangerous at worst. And, sadly, it’s often only the benefit of time that shines the needed light on how absurd these ideas are.

Take for example some of the craziest diets that have somehow made their way into public use:

Sunglasses Diet – A Japanese company recently started marketing blue-tinted sunglasses that reportedly make all food like unappealing. The idea is to curb your appetite by changing the color and appearance of the food you are considering eating. No mind that you could, say, take the sunglasses off. Or the fact that you look totally ridiculous wearing blue glasses at lunch in a dimly lit restaurant. At least you could curb you’re eating out — no one will want to be seen with you!

Tapeworm Diet — It’s still not clear whether this is an urban legend, but reportedly stars of the 1950s took capsules containing tapeworms that would then cause dramatic weight loss. Because, obviously, they are parasites! Call me crazy, but I try to avoid ingesting things that are known to cause disease and death.

Cotton Ball Diet — Another one of the more dangerous diets, the Cotton Ball Plan suggested ingesting cotton balls (low in calories apparently, and high in fiber) as an appetite suppressant. The fact that they can also clog your digestive system and serious malnutrition apparently was considered unimportant. (Note that if you find yourself eating non-food items, you should talk to a mental health professional.)

Swamp Diet — In a classic case of allowing a correlation to be confused with causation, one scientist found that people who lived near swamps tended to be heavier. His conclusion was that to maintain your figure, you need to simply move to a drier climate.

Miracle Soap — Many in China and Japan have sworn by the so-called miracle seaweed soap that they claim removes body fat in three out of four cases. Call me a skeptic, but my take? You might look cleaner and smell nicer with a good wash, but you’re not going to lose weight.

Drinking Man’s Diet – In a classic representation of the 1960′s, Robert Cameron began selling a pamphlet describing his “genius” diet solution: don’t eat, just drink. We would now call that alcoholism, but back then 2.4 million people bought the instruction guide and limited their intake to what Cameron called “man-type” food, items low in carbohydrates like steak and gin.

What’s significant is that each of these diets made a huge splash when it was introduced. People grasped on to soap and gin and cotton balls like they were the holy grail, only to be seriously disappointed when the results were absent, fleeting, or, in some cases, deadly. What’s also significant is that many of these diets were supported by trained medical doctors and backed by “research” (not the randomized controlled clinical trials we should expect, mind you). So while it would be easy to call the individuals who used them gullible or even stupid, they might not be so different from the rest of us.

I have a strong hunch that many of the diet trends that perpetuate our popular media today will be looked upon with eye rolls and smirks in years to come. Why are the Paleolithic Diet or HCG Diet or Wheat Belly Diet any different than those above? Just because the books these days are glossier and have their own Facebook pages? Because we see doctors-made-famous-by-reality-television promoting them? Because we feel more desperate than ever given the national push to address this so-called epidemic?

Personally, I don’t trust any way of eating that suggests cutting out dessert or leaving your body deprived of certain nutrients. I’ve seen enough of the comings and goings of certain fads to hop on any diet train. What I’ve learned is that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. And if a diet claims to be able to bring you happiness, popularity, or anything other than a possible reduction on a machine that you should probably throw away, you should toss it out with the blue-tinted sunglasses.