Up Next: Anorexia Algorithm
Simulated accounts registered as 13-year-old girls in the US, UK and EU were still recommended harmful eating-disorder videos by YouTube, although the rate fell from about one in three recommendations in 2024 to one in nine in 2026.
Executive summary
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CCDH tested YouTube with simulated accounts registered as 13-year-old girls in the United States, United Kingdom and European Union. After each account viewed an eating-disorder video, researchers analysed 300 recommendations in the “Up Next” feed.
YouTube continued to recommend videos promoting thinspiration, extreme calorie restriction and subliminal weight loss, including material that the researchers assessed as breaching YouTube’s policies. Across the three locations, harmful recommendations declined from an average of one in three videos in CCDH’s 2024 investigation to one in nine in 2026.
The study also checked 20 eating-disorder search terms. Nine displayed crisis-resource panels, but none of the harmful videos in the dataset carried such a panel. CCDH concludes that recent safeguards and regulatory pressure have reduced exposure but have not prevented YouTube from recommending harmful content to child accounts.
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