“Why can’t I just be fat and exist on the internet?”: The embeddedness of antifatness on TikTok

Antifat bias engenders systemic harms for fat people ranging from bullying and harassment to discrimination and social inequities. Social media platforms have afforded the fat liberation movement essential tools for their efforts to ensure the rights, freedoms, and respect for people of all sizes. Yet, platforms also tend to reinforce and exacerbate longstanding structural inequities, rendering them both sites of empowerment and ongoing struggle. We conducted a qualitative study to understand the challenges social media poses for fat users aligned with the fat liberation movement, particularly focusing on TikTok. We conducted interviews ( n = 16) with creators and consumers of fat liberation content online and analyzed TikTok videos in this genre ( n = 204). We found experiences suggestive of an antifat bias embedded in and coproduced by TikTok's user culture, algorithmic systems, and policies. Interviewees and TikTok videos highlighted an unevenness in the visibility of fat liberation content relative to other content, antifat bullying and harassment, algorithmic recommendation of antifat content, and stifling expectations for fat creators. Informed by what fat activists and scholars call the “good fatty,” we suggest this ingrained antifat bias urges socially sanctioned performances of fatness on TikTok. Our findings corroborate existing work that casts doubts on the capacity for policy and design tweaks to rectify platformized systemic inequities. We affirm the need for a more radical rethinking of platform governance.