Creating safer social media environments for body image: Evidence and research priorities for multilevel...

Public, policy, and research interest is growing in interventions that create safer social media environments for body image. Although intervention efforts have primarily focused on helping individuals critically evaluate or manage social media, users' experiences are also shaped by parents, peers, influencers, advertisers, social norms, platform systems, and government regulation. This paper applies a social ecological framework to review emerging approaches across intrapersonal, interpersonal, organisational, community, and public-policy levels. At the intrapersonal level, media literacy, temporary reductions in use, and feed curation have produced mixed, though sometimes promising, effects. Evidence for interventions involving parents, educators, peers, and influencers remains limited, despite their potential to shape young people's social media practices and the content they encounter. Similarly, advertising labels have generally failed to protect body image, while more substantive changes to advertising content, platform design, recommendation systems, and social norms have rarely been evaluated. The effects of rapidly emerging policies and regulations on body image are also largely unknown. We identify priorities for developing and evaluating interventions at each level, including stakeholder co-design, ecologically valid trials, longer follow-ups, objective assessment of content exposure and engagement, and careful monitoring of unintended effects. Individual-level strategies remain important but cannot address the broader systems that produce and reinforce appearance pressures. Coordinated interventions across multiple ecological levels are needed to create meaningful and sustained improvements in social media environments.