It’s an uncertain time to be online. Facebook is a wasteland of right-wing misinformation, Instagram’s algorithm is broken, while ‘TikTok brain’ is rapidly depleting our attention spans. And now the future of Twitter looks bleak, as newly-appointed CEO Elon Musk – who recently bought the platform for a staggering $44 billion — shapes the site violently in his image, and hints at the possibility of bankruptcy. Naturally, it’s left many people wondering: where to next?
Thanks to the revival of Y2K fashion, indie sleaze and twee, nostalgia for Tumblr has been bubbling away for a while. But with the Twitter exodus now upon us (the platform is said to have lost more than a million users since Musk’s takeover) and people left scrambling for an alternative, Tumblr could be on the precipice of a full-blown resurgence. In the twelve days since Musk’s ownership of Twitter began, Tumblr saw adoption surge by 96% in the US, and 77% worldwide.
The longing for a return to the halcyon days of Tumblr is perhaps inevitable, and it’s also understandable. For many, the platform served as a vital outlet and in some cases, a lifeline. On mental health Tumblr, for example, “people communicate[d] the emotional distress, social isolation, practical, and sometimes amusing challenges of living with ill-mental health,” write Katrin Tiidenberg, Natalie Ann Hendry and Crystal Abidin in Tumblr, a 2021 book dissecting the platform’s influence. Tumblr became a safe haven, offering an escape from shame and stigma — particularly for LGBTQ+ people and other marginalised groups – while the proliferation of mental health memes on the platform allowed users to share, and humorously make tolerable, their situation.
It was also a place where subculture flourished. While the platform first emerged in 2007, 2014 is eulogised as the height of the ‘Tumblr girl’ aesthetic. It was an era of indie pop, finger moustaches, American Apparel tennis skirts, tattoo chokers, and knee socks. On Tumblr, being sad was cool. The visual nature of the site made user profiles akin to scrap books, typically decorated with photos of ‘it girls’ like Alexa Chung and Sky Ferreira, as well as Lana Del Rey and Lorde.
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But 2014 Tumblr fashion was often less about the outfits, and more the bodies behind them — bodies which were always, or almost always, thin. It’s unsurprising, then, that the revival of Tumblr has raised concern that some of the more dangerous elements that festered on the platform will reemerge with it — namely, pro-ana (pro-anorexia) content.
Thinspo — or ‘thin inspiration’ — became so rife that Tumblr, along with Instagram and Pinterest, banned the hashtag, along with similar pro-ana terms, in April 2012. This didn’t stop the proliferation of pro-ana content on the site, however, with users working around the ban by using code words, misspellings of terms, and backup hashtags (where the content would go if other tags were purged of content). As the authors detail in Tumblr, users would create blogs which gave a “performance of recovery” so as to conceal problematic content and evade the scrutiny of moderators.
“It is complicated to distinguish what is and what isn’t ‘pro-ana’, and where recovery meets obfuscation, given that users both disguise eating disorder content, and deny pro-ana themes on blogs,” write the authors of Tumblr. This meant that much of the pro-ana content on the platform was able to spread unchecked, outside of the algorithmic gaze.
With so many of the subcultures that dominated the app partaking in the glorification of thinness — either explicitly or implicitly – avoiding this kind of content could prove difficult. Levi, a 21-year-old from New York, blames much of their struggles with body image on Tumblr. “A lot of the destructive paths I was led down stemmed from the content I was being fed as a young adult on Tumblr,” they say. “Aesthetics like rockstar gf, heroin chic, or ballerinacore had a heavy implication that to be cool, ultimately [meant] neglecting your wellbeing”.
It’s why Levi eventually left the platform — and doesn’t see themselves going along with a Tumblr revival. “It would just set us back a decade in any progress of healing from the trauma many of us came away with from the content we consumed online,” they say. “[It] would only serve to repeat the cycle with this generation of young adults.”
Cyberpsychologist Dr. Catherine Talbot says that part of the problem stemmed from the way that Tumblr “encouraged and allowed complete anonymity”. This had both negative and positive consequences, in “allow[ing] users to create and engage with online communities without the interference of real-world factors,” Catherine explains. “This means that users can create new identities and find communities in which they feel a sense of belonging, without fear of real-world consequences.”
While anonymity offered some an important means to express themselves, it also gave people license to glamorise disordered eating — and in some instances, to abuse other members. These problems are, of course, by no means unique to Tumblr, with other platforms similarly plagued by pro-ana content and bullying. “I think it’s too easy to blame Tumblr for the emergence and spread of risky content,” says Catherine. “In my research, we are finding this type of content on virtually all social media platforms.”
Notably, on TikTok, many of the harmful trends associated with Tumblr are alive and well. Videos seeking to emulate the ‘Tumblr girl’ aesthetic and ‘heroin chic’ — a look characterised by waifish bodies and dishevelled hair popularised in the 90s — have been amassing millions of views on the platform. This more recent wave of content valorising skinniness marks a shift away from the 2010s, which saw a cultural embrace of ‘Kardashian’ curves and a wide variety of body types (although arguably, the privileging of smaller bodies never really went away).
The reality is that as long as people see women’s bodies as ‘trends’ these harmful cycles will continue — with or without Tumblr. The anorexia-crisis is indeed much bigger than any single social media platform: in January 2022, UK charity Beat provided the highest number of support sessions for people affected by eating disorders in a single month in its history. But social media undoubtedly plays a role in adding fuel to an already raging fire.
There is of course joy and comfort to be had in the collective nostalgia that Tumblr offers. But if this nostalgia clouds our ability to call out the platform’s more harmful elements, history will only repeat itself — with devastating consequences.