Body Management Information Practices on a Female-dominant Platform

TL;DR

This study explores how women on a Chinese social media platform seek, evaluate, and are influenced by body management information, highlighting challenges and design implications for healthier engagement.

Contribution

It provides new insights into user practices and decision factors in body management information seeking on social media, an area underexplored in HCI research.

Findings

Factors influencing decision-making include consumerism, poster popularity, and perceived authenticity.

Users face challenges in discerning reliable methods and managing body anxiety.

Content and media formats significantly impact information evaluation.

Abstract

With growing awareness of long-term health and wellness, everyday body management has become a widespread practice. Social media platforms and health-related applications offer abundant information for those pursuing healthier lifestyles and more positive body images. While prior Human-Computer Interaction research has focused extensively on technology-mediated health interventions, the user-initiated practices of browsing and evaluating body management information remain underexplored. In this paper, we study a female-dominant social media platform in China to examine how users seek such information and how it shapes their lifestyle choices. Through semi-structured interviews with 18 users, we identify factors including consumerism, poster popularity, and perceived authenticity that influence decision-making, alongside challenges such as discerning reliable methods and managing body anxiety triggered by social media. We contribute insights into how content and media formats interact to shape users' information evaluation, and we outline design implications for supporting more reliable and healthy engagements with body management information.