Sixteen-year-old Antonia (last name withheld) also runs a popular, photo-based thinspo blog out of her bedroom. “I like images that show skinny, happy girls,” she writes in an email to the Huffington Post. “They look so confident and we can see their bones through their skin. It’s the most beautiful thing ever. I also like tips about food or how to ignore hunger.”

Do the authors of these blogs recognize that their work is dangerous and disturbing? Frequently, yes. Travel far enough down the rabbit hole of Tumblr’s thinspo community — which often overlaps with the platform’s blogs devoted to health and fitness, dubbed “fitblrs” — and you’ll find cautionary signs advising those prone to disordered eating to venture no further. Look for the words “trigger warning,” thinspo code indicating that you’ve reached a pro-anorexia blog (aka pro-“ana” in thinspo speak).
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Search for “thinspo” on Tumblr, and you’ll find a landing page (www.tumblr.com/tagged/thinspo) with a seemingly endless stream of tagged posts — fashion photographs, food-diary entries, and quotes on willpower and beauty, driven by the thinspo and “fitspo” blogs of thousands of young women. Every word and image posted declares the user’s allegiance to an underweight ideal of beauty.