Body Management Information Practices on a Female-dominant Platform

2025-11-28

AI Summary

This study investigates how users on female-dominated Chinese social media platforms actively seek, evaluate, and apply body-management health information, and how such practices shape lifestyle decision-making. Method: Drawing on human-computer interaction and sociological perspectives, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 active users and performed thematic qualitative analysis. Contribution/Results: Findings reveal that credibility assessment is shaped by intersecting factors—including content format (e.g., short videos vs.图文 posts), author identity (KOLs vs. ordinary users), platform affordances, and consumerist discourses—while users simultaneously grapple with credibility ambiguity and embodied anxiety. We propose a novel “media–content–agent” co-judgment model to explicate structural tensions in health information practices. Based on this, we articulate three design principles for ethical health-social platforms: enhancing information transparency, mitigating aesthetic normativity, and fostering critical media literacy—offering empirically grounded theoretical contributions to HCI and digital health ethics.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Humans and AI: Intelligent User Interfaces

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization
• Social Networks and Social Media: Fairness and bias in social network and social media analysis
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI

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.

Problem

• Explores user-initiated body management information practices on female-dominant platforms
• Investigates factors like consumerism and authenticity influencing lifestyle decision-making
• Addresses challenges in discerning reliable methods and managing body anxiety

Innovation

• Studying user-initiated browsing on female-dominant platform
• Identifying factors like consumerism and authenticity in decisions
• Outlining design for reliable body management information engagement