Adolescents who engage in self-harm, such as cutting, are using covert hashtags to connect on social media, according to a new study by Seattle researchers.
Hashtags are keywords that connect like-minded users on platforms such as Instagram. That service has banned terms that obviously promote self-injury, like “#self-harm.” But Dr. Megan Moreno says that’s easily gotten around.
“The second term that emerged was ‘#self-harmm,’” she said. “Instagram eventually caught on to that term and blocked it as well. So we were up to ‘#self-harmmm.’”
Moreno is a physician and researcher at Seattle Children’s Hospital and the University of Washington. Her team assessed more than 200 Instagram posts using that hashtag, and uncovered a web of secret keywords associated with self-harm, including “#blithe,” “#ehtilb” or “cat,” for example.
“Really, anybody who has internet connectivity and a mouse could have essentially done the same study,” Moreno said.
But even though Moreno used only publicly available information, it is not clear that Instagram is up to date on the constantly shifting universe of ambiguous self-harm hashtags. Those sorts of keywords are supposed to trigger a content alert or a list of resources, but Moreno found only about a third of them did.
An Instagram spokesperson says posts celebrating self-harm are prohibited, and are removed when reported by other users.
Moreno notes that while connecting online can be healthy for people struggling with mental health problems, she worries about communities that normalize and even spread self-harm.
Moreno’s study is published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
