What is it about?
Many women use social media to find fitness advice, tips, and inspiration. But not everything online is trustworthy or helpful. In this study, we spoke with women about how they decide what fitness content to trust, how they deal with confusing or misleading information, and how they manage what shows up on their feeds. We found that women use a range of smart strategies to stay in control, avoid harmful content, and make social media work for them. Our findings can help designers and platforms create better, safer online spaces for fitness content.
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Why is it important?
Our study is one of the first to look closely at how women actively manage and make sense of fitness content on social media, rather than treating them as passive consumers. While much research focuses on the negative effects of online fitness culture, we highlight the smart and thoughtful ways women navigate these spaces. This is especially important now, as health misinformation and unrealistic body standards continue to spread online. Our work offers timely insights for improving digital platforms and making them safer and more supportive for women engaging with fitness content.
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: 'Take Everything With a Pinch of Salt': Learning to Navigate Fitness on Social Media, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, May 2025, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3711080.
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