The Relationship Between Eating Disorders and Social Media Use: A Brief Narrative Review with Bayesian Modeling for Enhanced Precision

The association between eating disorders and social media use has garnered significant research attention. Studies suggest that excessive engagement with highly visual social media platforms exacerbates body dissatisfaction and disordered eating behaviors, particularly among adolescents. This review synthesizes findings on social media duration, gender differences in engagement (e.g., selfie behaviors, photo manipulation), and their impacts on eating disorder pathology. We introduce a Bayesian modeling framework to enhance precision over traditional inferential statistics, offering refined estimates through Bayesian updating. This approach addresses challenges in translating cohort sizes to effective sample sizes amid socio-cultural and economic heterogeneity, yielding higher certainty in results. By integrating prior work on systems theory, we demonstrate Bayesian methods’ versatility in managing complex health conditions influenced by multiple factors.