Reddit's Pro-Eating-Disorder Communities and Documented Harm

For years Reddit hosted a network of communities oriented around eating disorders, including subreddits in the pro-ana (pro-anorexia) and pro-mia (pro-bulimia) tradition, the largest of which included r/proED. These spaces blended peer support with content that researchers and clinicians have described as normalizing or encouraging disordered eating, including shared weight goals and the framing of severe restriction as an aspiration rather than an illness. (Specific techniques and methods are deliberately omitted here.) The communities sat in a long-contested gray zone between harm-reduction-style mutual support and the active reinforcement of dangerous behavior.

Around 2018, Reddit removed two of its largest eating-disorder subreddits for 'encouraging physical harm.' Affected users responded with a Change.org petition asking Reddit to restore the communities, arguing that the spaces functioned as supportive, close-knit peer networks rather than promotional ones and that the removal was uninformed. The episode crystallized the central tension in moderating these communities: members often experience them as lifelines, while public-health evidence points to measurable risks associated with participation.

That evidence was strengthened by a longitudinal observational study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research on October 6, 2021, by Johannes Feldhege, Markus Moessner, and Stephanie Bauer of the Centre for Psychotherapy Research at University Hospital Heidelberg. Drawing on self-reported weight information from roughly 1,170 users of r/proED over about 15 months, the researchers found that both current and desired body mass index decreased over time, at predicted rates of about 0.087 and 0.015 BMI points per week respectively, with greater decreases among more active participants. Notably, even users with very low baseline weights continued to lose weight during participation, and many set extremely low, unrealistic weight goals.

The authors were explicit that the study is observational and cannot establish that participation caused the weight loss; people already on a disordered trajectory may self-select into these communities. Still, the finding that participation is associated with continued weight loss and progressively lower desired-weight goals, even among already-underweight users, is clinically significant and consistent with longstanding concerns about pro-ED content online. It is also part of a broader research literature, much of it predating Reddit, on pro-ana and pro-mia websites and their effects.

Moderation of these communities has proven difficult and arguably self-limiting. Bans tend to fragment communities rather than dissolve them: members reconstitute under new names, migrate to other platforms, and adopt coded or euphemistic language to evade keyword-based detection. This dynamic, documented across multiple platforms, means that enforcement can reduce visibility and reach on a given platform while pushing the most invested users into less-moderated spaces, complicating both safety interventions and the delivery of recovery resources. As with other harm-related online communities, experts caution against conflating association with causation and emphasize that recovery is possible with appropriate clinical support. Reddit's documented action here was the removal of the two largest such subreddits around 2018; it did not eliminate the underlying communities, which continue to re-form. (Specific eating-disorder techniques are deliberately omitted throughout.)