Leveraging social media algorithms to improve eating disorder screening.

Abstract

This chapter discusses the inherent limitations of traditional methods for screening eating disorders, the meteoric rise of content recommendation algorithms on social media, algorithm-related harms, and the repurposing of these algorithms for eating disorder screening. It discusses the origin of our interest in using social media algorithms for eating disorder screening, the advantages that social media algorithm data offer over existing efforts to use passively collected sensor data from smartphones for symptom prediction and screening, and our rationale for why the social media industry would help researchers use their algorithm data for health screening. It proposes a multiphase empirica..