Just one month after Tumblr banned content that "actively promotes or glorifies self-injury or self-harm," Pinterest has updated its terms of service to prevent users from pinning content of a similar nature. This is the second update Pinterest has made to its terms of service in the past week.
Pinterest now expressly forbids any content that "creates a risk of harm, loss, physical or mental injury, emotional distress, death, disability, disfigurement or physical or mental illness to yourself, to any other person, or to any animal." Content deemed racially or ethnically offensive, harassing, libelous, illegal, "inappropriate" to children or that tries to solicit personal user information, is also prohibited. To read the Terms of Service in full, click here.
Pinterest users have the media to thank for the update. Blogs including Jezebel have done much to spread awareness of pro-anorexia and "thinspiration" boards, where women with eating disorders exchange motivational images and tips for making themselves unhealthily thin.
Despite the update to its terms of service, Pinterest seems to have done little-to-nothing to edit out the pro-anorexia content. A search for one of the most popular related tags, "thinspo," yields thousands of pins of thin, scantily clad women: some arguably healthy, others not (see above).
Reps from Pinterest could not be reached for comment.