Exposure to Sexualised Appearance and Beauty Content on Social Media and Body Satisfaction in Female Adolescents: A Computational Real-World Approach

Experimental studies show that viewing idealised bodies on social media can lower body satisfaction, but whether this extends to the content adolescents actually encounter is unknown, because studies of everyday exposure have relied on self-report rather than on what was actually viewed. In an observational study, we combined TikTok data donation with a 14-day ecological momentary assessment in 66 female adolescents aged 14–18. A locally run computer vision pipeline classified the visual content of 242,422 watched videos for thin and sexualised female bodies – coding the imagery itself rather than hashtags or captions – and metadata-based classifiers identified beauty-filter use and TikTok’s own beauty-related content labels. Content meeting the body criterion made up under one minute of roughly 91 watched minutes per day. Across all three measures, daily exposure was not associated with end-of-day body satisfaction, within or between persons, nor was morning body satisfaction associated with subsequent exposure. Everyday exposure to appearance ideals may be too sparse and too stable from day to day for day-level designs to detect any effect of it.