Thinspiration Inspired by K-pop: A Comparison of K-pop Related Thinspiration Imagery and Texts to Regular Thinspiration Content on Tumblr

Linda Achilles, Thomas Mandl, Christa Womser-Hacker

Abstract: The use of social media platforms can be related to body dissatisfaction and disordered eating habits. In online communities, users share common interests and discuss it. One trend has emerged around the hashtag Thinspiration, which refers to content that shall inspire consumers to be or become thin. One derivate is the K-pop Thinspiration. The research aim in information science is to explore how K-pop Thinspiration is different from the regular Thinspiration content on Tumblr. Therefore, images and texts of the posts are automatically analyzed by means of the calculation of colorfulness and emotional measures of the images, as well as a sentiment analysis and readability score calculation of the texts. In addition, a qualitative content analysis of 153 K-pop related Thinspiration posts is performed. Results show that the K-pop Thinspiration posts are closer to the ones of the control data set, than to regular Thinspiration posts.