‘‘Don’t panic, don’t panic”: an analysis of a purported pro-eating disorder website/online content moral panic and legal and policy responses.

Abstract

It has been argued that newspaper responses to pro-eating disorder websites, within the United Kingdom (UK), constitute a moral panic. It is feared that moral panics may spur rash legal/policy responses. My analysis indicates that the consideration of pro-eating disorder websites by British newspaper journalists and others does not constitute a moral panic. I argue that the misuse of the moral panic concept exemplifies the dominance of emotivism within contemporary culture and may trivialise potential online harms and serve as an apologia for surveillance/digital capitalism. I contend that pro-eating disorder websites are potentially harmful and assess legal and policy responses, such as the Online Safety Act 2023 and the advancement of the digital commons. I also contend that the increase in the number of people suffering with eating disorders within the UK should be addressed by devoting more resources for research into, and the prevention and treatment of, eating disorders.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Benbow, D. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2266-0611
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© 2024 The Authors. Except as otherwise noted, this author-accepted version of a journal article published in Information & Communications Technology Law is made available via the University of Sheffield Research Publications and Copyright Policy under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ © 2024 The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Keywords:	Moral panic; Emotivism; pro-eating disorder websites; pro-ana; surveillance capitalism
Dates:	Published: 18 September 2024 Published (online): 18 September 2024 Accepted: 7 September 2024
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > School of Law
Depositing User:	Symplectic Sheffield
Date Deposited:	18 Sep 2024 15:23
Last Modified:	18 Sep 2024 15:23
Status:	Published online
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis Group
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1080/13600834.2024.2404283
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:217361

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‘‘Don’t panic, don’t panic”: an analysis of a purported pro-eating disorder website/online content moral panic and legal and policy responses.

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