Two young people living with an eating disorder will today sit across from meta representatives - to tell the company about the negative impacts of social media. Independent MP Zoe Daniel will also be participating in the roundtable. She hopes the discussion will encourage social media platforms to do more to promote healthy body image.
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00:00 I've been working with a lot of families, both in my electorate and across Australia,
00:05 to elevate this conversation about eating disorders, looking at prevention and also
00:10 looking at treatment. But having these discussions is really important. And the young people
00:16 with eating disorders that I speak to tell me that social media is a real driver. It
00:21 compounds their disorder often. And indeed, surveys that have been done by the Butterfly
00:26 Foundation, who I'm co-hosting this event with, show that 70% of people with eating
00:31 disorders say that social media platforms should be doing more to protect them. And
00:36 therefore, today we have experts, we have people with lived experience, and as you said,
00:40 we have Metta in the room to have a conversation about what the platforms are doing on a voluntary
00:45 basis and whether more needs to be done. If you are diagnosed with an eating disorder,
00:51 you're almost 4,000% more likely to receive the next video, which is eating disorder related,
01:00 and almost 400% more likely that the next video you receive will be diet related. And
01:06 the thing about the TikTok algorithm, which is different to other platforms, is it's not
01:10 intentional. You don't have to like something to receive material. It's to do with how much
01:15 time you spend viewing a particular video, and that then drives what you receive next.
01:21 So that's extremely problematic. And this is new, cutting edge research from Melbourne
01:25 University that we'll be discussing this morning.
01:27 [BLANK_AUDIO]