I don't want to contribute more to doomscrolling about the tumblr TOS thing, but another interesting side of the die of categorizing feedism as disordered eating is that if you know any more about eating disorders than what you can learn from an Alessia Cara song, the claim that feedist content should be suppressed because it depicts or encourages eating disorders instantly crumbles, and when you take a closer look at it, it's actually doing way more harm than good to the purported aim of helping people with EDs to seek treatment and to remove pro-ed content.
The DSM criteria outlines that in order to qualify as BED, "recurrent episodes of binge eating" must be associated with:
Eating more rapidly than usual
Eating until feeling uncomfortably full
Eating large amounts of food when not feeling physically hungry
Eating alone because of feeling embarrassed by how much one is eating
Feeling disgusted with oneself, depressed, or very guilty afterward
Marked distress about the binge-eating episodes
Positioning disordered binge eating as equivalent to (fat) people "excessively overeating" is factually incorrect, but more importantly perpetuates existing stigmatizing stereotypes about BED: that 'binge eaters' are fat people who eat too much because they have no self control around food, and just need to learn to control their eating.
One of the fundamental features (and mechanisms) of BED is that the individual's shame about eating leads to bingeing, which leads to shame about eating, and the cycle continues. Omitting the components of compulsion/loss of control and distress puts any act of eating a lot of food under suspicion of disordered eating, which plays directly into the stigmatizing stereotypes that perpetuate shame cycles of EDs, and prevents people from seeking treatment - not only as a direct result of shame but also because conflating disordered binge eating with 'overeating' trivializes disordered binge eating and spreads misinformation that prevents people from being able to accurately recognize real BED in themselves and others.
It also, as others have pointed out, implies that there is a quantifiable amount of food that is "too much" for any person. And with how subjective and vague "excessive" is, the new reporting rules leave it up to cultural 'common sense' of what is an allowable amount of food to eat, which is inextricable from societally sanctioned disordered eating behaviors and diet culture, and completely divorced from even a lot of mainstream health science.
Basically, the new 'self harm' parameters on Tumblr are saying that excessive overeating is an eating disorder, however we are leaving it up to Joe Tumblr, who we trust is a paragon of identifying what is a normal amount of food to eat, to decide, based solely on the amount of food they're eating, whether someone eating a lot on camera is self harming and has a clinical disorder.
And the funniest thing about the new reporting rules is that the preamble guidelines say:
Don't post content that actively promotes or glorifies self-harm. This includes content that urges or encourages others to: [...] embrace anorexia, bulimia, or other eating disorders [...] rather than, e.g., seeking counseling or treatment, or joining together in supportive conversation with those suffering or recovering from depression or other conditions.
I'm sorry, but can you point me to any clinical counseling or treatment program or protocol for feedism? It does not fall under any existing eating disorder diagnosis and there is no existing treatment for it, but we're supposed to be encouraging people who post feedism content to get into treatment? For what? Where? As someone who has been in both eating disorder treatment and has had sex therapy about my relationship with feedism, walking into an ED or sex therapist's office to get "treatment for feedism" is going to get you the same results as if you walked into counseling asking for treatment for being gay. They're going to help you understand and work through your shame about your sexuality and practice it in an emotionally healthy and sustainable way for you.
And in addition to the direct effects of deplatforming sex workers and fat people, which is already disproportionately affecting POC and queer & trans people, as many others have already brought up, this change is necessarily going to create a ton of irrelevant noise in the category of eating disorder post reports, taking time and resources away from suppressing actual eating disorder and pro-ed posts, blogs, and communities at a time when Tumblr staff are consistently reporting being stretched thin already (just scroll through the @/wip staff blog).
The premise behind this reporting tool is just so flimsy it's kind of embarrassing how obvious it's just moralizing about sexuality and food and fatness rather than any good faith concern for helping people with eating disorders.
