Mapping How Algorithms Are Reshaping Girls’ and Women’s Bodies  

Role: Principal Investigator with Research Team                                                 

Timeline: 2025-present

 

This in-progress study investigates how algorithms are reshaping bodies. Rather than treating body image as an individual or cultural problem alone, this study examines how platform architectures, optimization strategies, and visual economies systematically produce embodied outcomes—affecting behavior, self-perception, identity formation, and health. The study is grounded in the premise that algorithmic systems do not merely reflect existing norms around bodies; they operationalize and intensify them, translating abstract design decisions into material, lived consequences.

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Key Questions

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• How do algorithmic recommendation systems shape which bodies, aesthetics, and practices become visible, desirable, and repeatable for girls and young women?

• In what ways do engagement-driven feedback loops intensify comparison, self-surveillance, and bodily discipline over time?

• How do platform features collapse distinctions between wellness, beauty, performance, and health, particularly for adolescent users?

• What patterns emerge when body-related content is traced across platforms, formats, and life stages?

• How can technology companies identify and mitigate embodied harms that arise not from isolated content, but from cumulative algorithmic exposure?

 

Methodology

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The research adopts a mixed qualitative and critical-technical approach that combines close observation of platform dynamics with sustained engagement with users’ lived experiences. Particular attention is paid to moments where platform logic intersects with health-related behaviors. The research explicitly considers how algorithmic systems shape not only participant experience, but also what is observable, traceable, and measurable to the researcher. 

 

Study Design

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• Semi-structured interviews: All participants engage in an initial interview exploring their platform use, self-presentation practices, body image, and perceptions and knowledge about algorithmic systems.

• Diary studies: Participants are then asked to document their daily interactions with social media over a defined period, capturing in-the-moment reflections on feeds, recommendations, emotional responses, and body-related content.

• Artifact collection: As part of the diary study, participants also archive screenshots of feeds, recommended posts, filters, comments, and other algorithmically surfaced content they are encountering on a daily basis.

• Feed walkthroughs: Following the diary study, participants reconnect--in person--with a member of the research team to review diary entries and artifacts with the researcher to reflect on patterns of visibility, engagement, and algorithmic feedback.

 

Sampling 

 

Participants between the ages of 15 and 23 have been recruited, with attention to diversity in age, platform use, and social context. Rather than aiming for statistical representation, the study prioritizes depth, pattern recognition, and longitudinal insight. Sampling acknowledges that algorithmic systems personalize experiences differently for each user. As such, credibility is established through recurring patterns across accounts, sustained engagement, and triangulation between user narratives, platform observation, and content analysis.​​

 

Key Insights (emerging)

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• Algorithmic systems produce embodied effects, not just informational ones: Exposure patterns shape how users eat, move, modify, and monitor their bodies.

• Engagement optimization intensifies extremes: Systems designed to maximize attention tend to escalate toward more rigid, performative, or harmful body norms over time.

• Wellness, beauty, and health collapse into a single algorithmic category: Platforms blur distinctions in ways that obscure risk and normalize self-discipline as self-care.

• Harms are cumulative, not episodic: The most significant effects emerge from repeated exposure and feedback loops rather than single pieces of content.

• Design decisions translate into physical consequences: Seemingly abstract choices about ranking, recommendation, and visibility materialize in users’ everyday bodily practices.

• Understanding how a platform works doesn't always mitigate harmful effects: Most of the participants in the study, even the youngest, are knowledgeable users, often possessing sophisticated understandings of how platforms work; this doesn't necessarily mitigate how these users are impacted by the platforms in question. 

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Impact

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The findings of this study will be shared in future publications and presentations. 

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