The Mechanism of Social Media’s Impact on Women’s Body Image

Concern

Jiayi Li

Deparment of Education, University of Bristol, Bristol, England, U.K.

Keywords: Social Media, Body Image Concern, Self-Objectification, Social Comparison, Unification of Aesthetics.

Abstract: With digital media promoting perfect persona and perfect body image, social media influencers have been

causing anxiety and psychological stress among users. Existing studies have shown that the body image

concern that social media cause may lead to various mental health issues for individuals, ranging from eating

disorder to depression. This research aims to review the impact of social media on women’s body image, and

the mechanism behind. Through 3 different ways: self-objectification, social comparison, and unification of

aesthetics, social media cause a negative impact on women’s body image and cause physical and mental health

issues eventually. Women would treat themselves as objects to be gazed at by others in the self-objectification

situation. Also, social media reinforces the fallacy that only perfection reflects one's value through the

feedback mechanism of likes, promoting single value and causing social comparison. The research also gave

some suggestions based on each mechanism, to buffer the negative effect of social media.

1 INTRODUCTION

Social media has become an important part of the

daily life of people all over the world. According to a

survey conducted in 2024, there are over 5 billion

social media users globally, and the number of such

users is still increasing continuously, especially in

developing countries. Take TikTok as an example,

people start to record and share their daily life clips

on short-video platforms, such as sharing daily

outfits, makeup tutorials, travel log-style video blogs

or self-discipline life and so on. In fact, when short-

video apps were just emerging, people might have

been sharing the content or life status they wanted to

share very purely. But now, some bloggers create a

perfect persona to attract traffic and make money,

which may cause deep anxiety. Under the influence

of popular culture and aesthetic standards, more and

more women are facing the problem of body image

anxiety, and even resulting in psychological and

physiological problems such as eating disorders and

plastic surgery anxiety. This study aims to explore the

possibility that seeing others' glamorous lives and the

image of bloggers with high appearance and good

figure may lead to anxiety, inferiority complex and

lack of confidence.

Perfect persona refers to the idealized image that

individuals create through carefully selected content

such as edited photos, success stories, displays of

happy life and so on. This image usually conforms to

the mainstream aesthetic and values of society. The

popularity of this perfect persona stems from the

performative nature of social media (Goffman 1959)

and the algorithmic mechanisms of the platforms that

people tend to showcase their most glamorous aspects

in order to receive more likes and attention, and the

platforms further reinforce this behavior through

traffic rewards.

2 THE NEGATIVE IMPACTS OF

CREATING PERFECT

PERSONAS

The perfect persona on social media has many

negative impacts. The typical impacts include

individuals and social relationships. The negative

impacts on individuals are divided into two

perspectives: the audience and the blogger

themselves. For viewers who watch videos, long-term

exposure to the carefully designed personas and

lifestyles of online bloggers will lead to a contrast,

resulting in a decline in self-identity, self-devaluation

630

Li, J.

The Mechanism of Social Media’s Impact on Women’s Body Image Concern.

DOI: 10.5220/0014395000004859

Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Politics, Law, and Social Science (ICPLSS 2025), pages 630-633

ISBN: 978-989-758-785-6

of personal value, and huge psychological pressure

(Fardouly, J., & Vartanian 2015). Similarly, for

bloggers, in order to maintain their personas, they

may cause excessive performance and psychological

over-tension because there is always the risk of

persona collapse at any time, such as being

unexpectedly encountered by fans in real life, but fans

think that the blogger's real life is different from the

edited pictures posted online. The large number of

likes and praising comments from the audience may

lead bloggers to overly rely on the online perfect

image, thus causing inadaptability in real social

interactions and even avoiding social interactions.

The second point regarding the impact on social

relationships is the crisis of trust and false social

interaction (Fardouly, J., & Vartanian 2015). When

people realize that the perfection on social media is

mostly packaged, they may doubt the authenticity of

others. When people think that only high likes and

many comments can reflect personal value, the

interaction between people becomes a simple like

social interaction, lacking deep emotional

connection.

Perfect persona refers to the impeccable image

that an individual deliberately constructs in social

media or in real life. Meanwhile, body dysmorphia

pertains to the dissatisfaction and anxiety regarding

one's own body shape. There exists a complex

interaction between these two aspects. Many bloggers

gain a lot of likes and attention through their good-

looking photos and videos, leading to the

reinforcement of the idea that appearance is value.

Anxiety about body image can lead some people

to take extreme approaches to weight control. For

example, extreme dieting and anorexia, which leads

to malnutrition can be life-threatening in severe cases.

There may also be bulimia after extreme hunger, for

people who have lost weight, there will be a strong

sense of guilt after overeating, they will be vomiting

or unhealthy drugs; in order to control their weight,

these behaviors are very unhealthy and dangerous for

people's body. For appearance anxiety, perfect bodies

and flawless skin on social media platforms are often

retouched or beautified to create unrealistic aesthetic

standards (Dijkslag et al. 2024). Users are

constantly seeing high-caliber bloggers and fitness

experts, which makes ordinary people feel inferior

and leads to appearance anxiety.

3 MECHANISMS OF ANXIETY

CAUSED BY SOCIAL MEDIA

3.1 Self-Objectification Mechanism

In the context of social media, the objectification of

the self is becoming more and more serious.

Objectification refers to individuals seeing

themselves as objects to be gazed at by others, and

treating the body as an external image to be evaluated

and scrutinized, rather than as a subject experiencing

life (Fredrickson & Roberts 1997). First, the other's

perspective has become serious. Nowadays, after

posting selfies, outfit photos, and fitness photos,

many people tend to focus on whether the photos look

good, whether they look thin, and whether there are

people liking them, instead of focusing on how they

feel about themselves, whether they had a good time

today, and whether the photos they took have left

good memories. These behaviors gradually reinforce

the idea that I am seen by others and my body is part

of my social value. Secondly, the feedback

mechanism of social media is also a cause of anxiety.

Since a beautifully retouched picture will get a lot of

compliments and likes, more and more people are

constantly checking themselves through the camera

to see if they meet the aesthetic standards, and then

posting their own retouched pictures, which further

strengthens the concept that only the perfect picture

can be posted. At this time, if the feedback from

netizens is positive, it will be easy for people to think

that appearance and body recognition is a reflection

of self-worth. Serious self-objectification will

constantly care about other people's comments about

themselves, even if one is alone will often feel that

they are being paid attention to(Cohen, 2018). Long-

term self-denial and over-catering to public aesthetics

can lead to serious depression, anxiety and other

mental health problems.

3.2 Social Comparison Mechanism

People have an intrinsic motivation and tend to

compare themselves with others in order to assess

their abilities, self-worth or social status (Festinger

1957). Social media reinforces the fallacy that only

perfection reflects one's value through the feedback

mechanism of likes, and then through the mechanism

of social comparisons makes users constantly wonder

if they are going perfect enough, which ultimately

creates a sense of dissatisfaction and anxiety among

women about their body image. Proposed by

psychologist Leon.

The Mechanism of Social Media’s Impact on Women’s Body Image Concern

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Social media platforms present an abundance of

photoshopped images of the perfect body, which

users are repeatedly exposed to and subconsciously

use as a reference point. At the same time, users often

start comparing themselves to the perfect persona on

the internet, rather than to real people with similar

backgrounds. This upward comparison can easily

lead to low self-esteem and self-denial (Festinger

1957). This series of operations is a vicious circle.

3.3 The Unification of Aesthetics and

the Mechanism of Platforms

Algorithmic recommendation mechanisms are

another central pathway to understanding how social

media exacerbates women's body image anxieties.

Based on the feedback mechanism of likes and social

comparisons, recommendation algorithms act as

amplifiers and filters that determine who, what, and

how much you see. Media platforms will calculate

each user's favorite type of video through the user's

time spent on different types of videos, favorites and

comments. Therefore, the platform will recommend

the video content that the user is likely to be interested

in more accurately.

Platforms may build a single aesthetic platform. If

you click on a few videos or notes related to good

body shape, high face value, and slimming, the

algorithm will start pushing similar content over and

over again. Resulting in the illusion that the only

thing in your stream is the perfect and ideal body and

beauty, mistakenly believing that is the mass

standard.

4 IMPROVEMENT METHOD

With the widespread use of digital social media, more

and more women are caught up in body image

dissatisfaction and anxiety. In order to alleviate this

problem at root, not only do we need to raise

awareness at the user level, but we also need to

actively intervene at the technical and ethical levels

of the platforms.

Improving the mechanism of self-objectification

requires efforts from both self-awareness education

and platform content guidance. At the educational

level, it is necessary to enhance the popularization of

the concepts of body neutrality and body positivity,

guiding women to shift their self-worth from beauty

as perceived by others to function, health and true

feelings of the body. At the platform level, it is

necessary to encourage creators to present real,

natural and imperfect body states, and provide

preferential recommendations for such content. For

example, establish real beauty tag recommendations,

launch anti-filter challenge activities, and gradually

break the cultural narrative of beauty equals value

(Simon, et al. 2022) .

Comments, content dwell time, etc. make users'

self-evaluation increasingly dependent on platform

feedback, which in turn influences emotions and

behavioral choices. To alleviate this external

evaluation dependence, changes can be made in two

directions. First, weaken the display weight of public

data. Platforms can allow users to independently

choose whether to display the number of likes or not,

reducing the influence of the single evaluation

criterion of likes equals value. Second, increase the

multi-dimensional evaluation mechanism of content.

The platform can introduce feedback mechanisms for

dimensions such as interesting content, real life and

independence of viewpoints, so that likes are no

longer limited to appearance and aesthetic judgments,

but focus more on value, thought and personality

expression (Cohen 2018). The feedback mechanism

makes the likes no longer limited to appearance and

aesthetic judgment, but more focused on value,

thought and personality expression.

In the social media environment, women are more

likely to engage in up-comparisons, often comparing

themselves to users on the platform who have better

looks, better bodies, and richer lives, resulting in body

dissatisfaction and negative self-perceptions.

Intervening in this mechanism requires addressing

two issues: the selectivity of information exposure

and the unreality of comparison objects.

Platforms should strengthen the mechanism of

pushing diversified content, and include people of

different body sizes, ages, skin colors, and styles in

the recommendation scope, so as to break the single

aesthetic standard. At the same time, the platform

should establish a mechanism for psychological

adjustment and guidance, for example, when

displaying content that may cause comparative

anxiety, it should prompt pop-up tips such as These

pictures may have been retouched and Everyone's

beauty is unique (Choukas-Bradley 2022).

Everyone's beauty has its uniqueness and other pop-

up tips to help users feel more comfortable and

healthier.

The algorithmic recommendation mechanism is

the most insidious yet critical technical factor

affecting body image on current social platforms.

Improving this mechanism requires platforms to

implement mental health protection algorithms, and

once they recognize that users frequently view

content related to body image, cosmetic surgery, and

ICPLSS 2025 - International Conference on Politics, Law, and Social Science

632

beauty, they should appropriately insert positive

psychological construction content, such as body

acceptance education and psychological adjustment

advice. More importantly, platforms should enhance

the transparency of their algorithms, informing users

of why you are seeing this content and allowing them

to manually adjust their recommendation preferences.

5 CONCLUSION

There is a close relationship between an ideal

character portrayal and personal psychological stress

and anxiety. This research elaborates on the

advantages and disadvantages of social media for

people, as well as some related mechanisms of the

platforms. To eliminate the influence of the false

reality on people brought about by the network, it

requires the joint efforts of the network platforms and

users. Healthy beauty is the future trend. Women

should face the perfect personas on the Internet

calmly and enjoy a happy and healthy life in the

present.

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