Net censorship and pro-ana: How should social media sites deal with self-harm culture?

Antonio A. Casilli at BodySpaceSociety, a "blog for recovering social scientists," has an interesting post on understanding "pro-ana"/"pro-mia" on social media sites like Pinterest and Tumblr. Snip:

On February 23rd, 2012 Tumblr announced its decision to turn the screw on self-harm blogs: suicide, mutilation and most prominently thinspiration – i.e. the ritualized exchange of images and quotes meant to inspire readers to be thin. This cultural practice is distinctive of the pro-ana (anorexia nervosa), pro-mia (bulimia) and pro-ED (eating disorders) groups online: blogs, forums, and communities created by people suffering from eating-related conditions, who display a proactive stance and critically abide by medical advice.
A righteous limitation of harmful contents or just another way to avoid liability by marginalizing a stigmatized subculture? Whatever your opinion, it might not come as a surprise that the disbanded pro-ana Tumblr bloggers are regrouping elsewhere. Of all places, they are surfacing on Pinterest, the up-and-coming photo-sharing site.

BANNING PRO-ANA WEBSITES? NOT A GOOD IDEA, AS WEB CENSORSHIP MIGHT HAVE A ‘TOOTHPASTE TUBE EFFECT’ (via danah boyd)

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

MORE: censorship • eating disorders • internet culture • pro ana • pro mia

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koko szanel

Why would anyone starve themselves instead of working out? does not compute
- Tyler Riddle
  
  You are aware that working out takes effort, right?
  - blueelm
    
    Because they like being a level of thin that eating plenty and working out wouldn’t support. Anorexics may be a lot of things, but lazy or undisciplined not so much.
    - ZikZak
      
      Anorexia is an eating disorder. Generally speaking, it is not actually about being thin (or at least not exclusively). Case in point: some of the anorexics celebrating those “thinspiration” images actually weigh less than the people depicted.
      
      The images are not intended to be literal targets – e.g. “I want to lose this much weight”. As a caption in the above screencap says “I want to be her!”. They’re reminders of one’s general inadequacy. You are not as happy, as beautiful, or as perfect as the model in this photo seems to be, and therefore you don’t deserve to eat.
      - blueelm
        
        The choir, you’re preaching to it. Tell me all about anorexia and what it means though, I’m listening.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  To be fair, some people can’t work out and have to diet to remain thin. But probably not these people.
  - SomeGuyNamedMark
    
    Weight loss comes mainly from controlling one’s diet, not simply by working out. The amount of calories in one piece of pie could wipe out an entire evening’s workout. People also tend to wildly overestimate the amount of calories they burn. Exercise will help you maintain a weight but you need to check your intake to really get there.
    - spacedmonkey
      
      Adding muscle mass makes you burn more calories all the time, and I’m convinced from personal experience that serious aerobic exercise like running or swimming has effects on your metabolism that go far beyond the modest amount of calories you burn during your workout.
      - http://goodsharer.com/ Aloisius
        
        The number of calories you burn from adding an extra pound of muscle is about 10 calories per day.
        
        This is assuming you aren’t running a marathon every day in which case, you’ll burn more simply because more muscle will be used during exercise.
      - agthorn1981
        
        10 calories a day in BMR increase, about 12-13 in TDEE assuming no other change. But that’s about 1.3 pounds a year or 13 pounds in a decade. It adds up.
- dragonfrog
  
  Yes, Anorexia Athletica also exists…
- http://twitter.com/sirkowski Sirkowski
  
  Not sure if serious…
- Guest
  
  Ugly, unavoidable, practically unshakable, soul destroying psychosis and neurosis. Very sad.
  
  As for censorship of ideas, very sad too. Counter-examples in the form of role models would be better? Look at Israel. They didn’t ban talking about/promoting these problem behaviours online (AFAIK), but they certainly banned the glorification of them on the runway. That’s ace in my books.
- chgoliz
  
  Many of them do work out – obsessively – in addition to starving and/or purging.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    Wasn’t it Twiggy who, when asked how she got her look, said, “No food, no exercise, no light” or something like that?
spacedmonkey

Does it strike anyone else as odd that we consider anorexia an eating disorder, but not constantly gorging yourself into an advanced state of obesity? It seems to me that that’s just as much an eating disorder, and at least as prevalent in America.

PS: I am in no way suggesting that the body image peddled to women by our pop culture is healthy or that anorexia isn’t a serious issue.
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Ender-Wiggin/100000885624281 Ender Wiggin
  
  medically i’m pretty sure both are considered eating disorders.
  - Guest
    
    It’s also hard when your metabolism is up against you. I consume about 3x the calories that are considered the norm, just to maintain a close to “optimal” BMI. On the other hand, I know people who can consume 1/3x of the normal calories, and gain weight like magic.
    
    It’s so much more complicated than just blaming it on people eating like “birds” or “pigs”.
- apoxia
  
  ”gorging yourself into an advanced state of obesity” could well meet criteria for binge eating disorder, which is a proposed eating disorder, and way well be in the next DSM (the mental disorder bible/manual).
  - RedShirt77
    
    How long have the other eating disorders been in the DSM? 20 or 30 years?
    - apoxia
      
      After some internet research I found the following:
      DSM-III (1980) included anorexia nervosa and bulimia (minus nervosa)
      DSM-III-revised (1987) included altered criteria for bulimia nervosa
      DSM-IV (1994) included the other two plus binge eating disorder as a proposed diagnosis.
      
      DSM-V is likely to include binge eating disorder in its own right. A similar but distinct eating problem called “night eating syndrome” was described by Albert Stunkard in 1955. I researched this a few years ago, and although distinct, many people with binge eating disorder might also exhibit night eating behaviour.
      
      So binge eating disorder came into usage 7 years after the more detailed bulimia nervosa criteria, and 14 years after anorexia nervosa, but similar behaviour was observed by Stunkard decades before this. DSM-III was really a watershed in the way that mental disorders are still understood today. Most criteria were written by one man, Robert Spitzer, with his hand-picked committee. DSM-III was completed in one year. Scary to think one small group of people essentially developed our modern diagnostic classification system.
http://www.lethbianlove.ca Jonathan Růžek

Most of the images in that screenshot are normal body types, except for possibly the skinny swimsuit girls. Even then, my mom was just as thin as them back in the day and was not anorexic.
- http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo
  
  Yeah, there’s a pretty big element of folks pointing at slim people and calling them anorexic, presumably to make their own obesity seem less pathological…
  
  To me, eating is an expensive hassle you have to do far too often. Not that I don’t enjoy food, or marvel at the efficiency of my body, but it’s nonetheless a constant chore I generally seek to minimise.
  
  Laziness can work for you in this regard, but you prolly need quite a bit of practice at ignoring hunger… it doesn’t make me eat; what makes me eat is low blood sugar. I’ve been like this 30 years; I must have saved a huge amount of money and time by now… and don’t forget the carbon footprint.
  
  This isn’t an eating disorder or a body image thing; I wouldn’t mind 10kg more muscle on me – but I just can’t be bothered. Far easier to just go hungry, and anyway, I hear it’s good for your longevity.
  - marilove
    
    “Yeah, there’s a pretty big element of folks pointing at slim people and calling them anorexic, presumably to make their own obesity seem less pathological…”
    
    What? No. This isn’t going on here at all. But way to blame the fatties even for this!
    
    This is about anorexic women posting thinsperation photos. As explained above, it’s not all about not being thin enough; it’s also about not being adequate. These pictures — again, posted by anorexics, not obese people — represent perfection, something which they feel they can never be. Of course, this is just one of many reasons why someone might be anorexic. I can’t even begin to guess or presume why someone might be. But it isn’t all about weight or being fat.
    
    Kinda interesting how a post about anorexics posting thinsperation pics has so quickly turned into “OMG obese people!!!!”
    
    Seriously, way to hijack a thread about anorexia just so you can brag about how superior you are because you dislike eating and would rather go hungry because isn’t going hungry SO HEALTHY? Ironic, considering this is a post about people starving themselves to death.
    
    But as long as you enjoyed patting yourself on your back about how awesome and thin and not-fat you are, amiright?!
    - blueelm
      
      I’m sorry, but this is really a sticking point for me. I think people need to stop thinking of anorexics as people who are trying to be “adequate” really. These pictures represent something most anorexics absolutely *can* be and are damned proud of.
    - http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo
      
      Way to completely miss the fact (or deliberately ignore in order to bang your drum) that I was replying to a comment wondering why photos of normal, healthy people were supposed to represent anorexics.
      
      Hijack, eh? Take it away…
      
      /bails
      
      EDIT, since I can’t reply:
      
      Your passive-aggressive projection is sad to behold. Get a life.
      
      For the record: it’s not exactly a crime to digress slightly from a topic, you know. And despite your alarm-bell certainty of my motivations, my post is in response to the fact that an obese populace is creating skewed norms, rather some feverishly-imagined need to jerk off over having a normal physique.
      
      It’d be off-colour of me to go making presumptions about you, but since you got the ball rolling, let me guess: you’re fat.
      
      Go figure…
      - marilove
        
        I did not miss the point of your off-topic, narcissistic, back-patting post.
        
        It’s pretty disgusting to brag about how much you just don’t like eating, and indeed isn’t it SO HEALTHY to starve yourself?! when this post is about a disease in which people often die because they are starving to death. You are either incredibly narcissistic (most likely) or incredibly dense and insensitive. Maybe a bit of all three.
  - takurospirit
    
    You can’t be bothered to eat, I can’t be bothered to exercise. Actually if my husband goes out of town I lose like 3-5 pounds a week (I’m really fat, don’t really give a fuck). I’m just lazy. I’m not going out for groceries or cooking if no one else is eating. Before him actually all I ate is like a “Healthy Choice” or Ramen for dinner. His skinny ass needs like 3-4 meals a day. So lazy leads you to thin and me to fat. Why hate? Lazy is lazy.
    - http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo
      
      Care to point out where the hate is?
      
      I dislike fat people calling thin people anorexic just because fat is normal; it’s an ugly thing. That’s hardly hate.
      
      And I merely wonder why so many are so fat, when it seems like a huge effort to become fat to me.
      
      Oh wait, I get it – that last is likely to be taken by many overweight folks as some sort of blatant, bragging, affront. Wrong, and to perceive it as such seems to me a symptom of some stuff you might do well to look into.
      
      I genuinely wonder why finding food to needlessly consume isn’t regarded as a pointless chore by many more. We’re always told how unhealthy it is to be fat, but who really gives a shit until it’s too late? Why isn’t there more focus on what a hassle it is?
      
      How many years of a lifetime does the average American spend eating and shitting, for instance?
Justin Caffier

Not all of the pics in the main image exemplify anorexia. While I’m all for battling anorexia and bulimia, there’s a weird anti-skinny sentiment to this post.
- Moriarty
  
  I’ve noticed that’s kind of a pattern, which I think is indicative of what’s currently politically correct in our culture. The same people who will call you a misogynist with oppressive standards for deriding a large woman will be all “2/10 would not bang” when shown women on the skinny end of the spectrum.
  
  And of course, making fun of men’s bodies is always fair game, apparently.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    The same people who will call you a misogynist with oppressive standards for deriding a large woman will be all “2/10 would not bang” when shown women on the skinny end of the spectrum.
    
    My observations of my straight male friends is that they often express attraction to larger women but only want to be seen in public with stick figures. Actually, my gay male friends aren’t that different; you just have to substitute ‘muscleman’ for ‘stick figure’.
    - C W
      
      “Actually, my gay male friends aren’t that different; you just have to substitute ‘muscleman’ for ‘stick figure’.”
      
      IDK, Seattle is filled with bear-love, but then again, I’m not in that dating scene so I don’t have to worry about all the subtler aspects and interpersonal dynamics.
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        I think that people have to go through a coming out process to admit that they’re bear lovers or any other non-model lovers.
    - Cefeida
      
      People are dicks about appearances, and I include myself in that statement. I used to go out with someone who had a visible deformity-we were happy for six years, but it took me way too long to shake that ‘Gosh I wished he looked normal’ feeling.
      - http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo
        
        Pretty sure I’m not going out on too much of a limb to say that stuff is fundamentally hardwired. Sure, individual and social tastes vary, but finding a healthy mate is some pretty basic shit.
        
        I’d say overcoming that in a medium-term timeframe is reasonably impressive.
- C W
  
  I’ve seen pro-ana sites. These are not good examples of their content, which is much more horrifying. These are pretty sanitized.
  - chgoliz
    
    This.
    
    It’s the equivalent of the “plus sized models” who are, at most, size 12 or so.
- RedShirt77
  
  I believe the point is made above, its not that the pictures are of those with eating disorders , Its that women collect pictures of thin women on thinspiration boards to inspire them to lose lots of weight. Many of those women actually have a disorder.
- Cefeida
  
  What’s in the pictures is not the point- it’s about what those who post them do to themselves in an effort to attain their desired body mass. Most of them will be way past what’s in the pictures, and yet will continue to starve themselves because they have an inaccurate percepetion of their own body. That’s the disorder. The pictured tumblr looks very much pro-ana.
SamuraiMark

The correct phrase is “Nothing tastes as good being lean feels.”
- kiwidebz
  
  Actually it’s not correct, you missed the word “as” between “good” and “being”… but that aside, the original quote was correct – a while back, Kate Moss caused outrage by stating that this was one of her personal mottos:
  
  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/6602430/Kate-Moss-Nothing-tastes-as-good-as-skinny-feels.html
trackofalljades

How should social media sites deal with “self-harm” culture? I dunno, probably the same way they deal with smoking and drinking and any number of other things which are routinely discussed and promoted through those same sites.

Don’t misread me, the effects of eating disorders are horrible especially among the young…but I fail to see how this is Super Uniquely Special and not part of a larger, broader issue that isn’t being addressed on other fronts as well (fronts which are, statistically, far more damaging to society).
- EH
  
  It’s interesting to think of it as a vice.
- chgoliz
  
  I just want to respond to your statement “eating disorders are horrible especially among the young.”
  
  Most people think that ED only affects teens and young adults. In fact, most sufferers don’t die of it while still young….but they have ongoing medical problems for the rest of their lives, often causing earlier death that what should have been. People often know about how EDs affect the heart, but actually brain damage is a HUGE problem, and of course all the other internal organs suffer in various ways. It can be a slow, ugly death over decades for those who are lucky enough to not drop dead in the first few years.
  - takurospirit
    
    I had to go ahead and abandon my “bulimia as weight control” methods because last time it felt like my heart was about to rip out of my chest and the pain in my throat was unbearable. I said above I don’t care I’m fat, but it used to be all I cared about. I had to let it all go. Plus I got pregnant and wasn’t about to give my child spina bifida or something because I wanted to wear tiny pants. I started at 11 and phased it out by my late 20′s with a relapse here and there. My metabolism is for shit. But otherwise I think I’m fine. Though my pediatrician estimated the shortest I’d be is 5’9″ and I only made it to 5’7″.
    - chgoliz
      
      I applaud your successful fight against this disorder.
      
      I hope you turned your long term health around in time.
http://blog.monstuff.com Julien Couvreur

Censorship is a misnomer. Only government can truly censor, in the sense of banning a communication, content or idea.
Publishers and services like Tumblr are free to accept the users and set rules for the content posted. That is not censorship as Tumblr cannot prevent those users and that content from going to a competitor.

This is no different than asking people to turn off cellphones in the theater, some restaurants having dress codes, or not allowing smoking in my house.

The rules are part of the various features that distinguish competitors. Different people will prefer different providers and substitutes because of that.
Services that make bad choices in terms of serving people’s needs within workable costs and constraints will have losses instead of profits and will be replaced by more successful projects.
- RedShirt77
  
  No one company can censor, but working colaboratively an entire industry takes a quasi Govt role and can.
  - http://blog.monstuff.com Julien Couvreur
    
    In the era of self-hosted blogs and open-source platforms, this argument is vacuous.
    
    Although it is theoretically possible for an industry to collude the way you describe, they still cannot prevent entry by new competitors or self-hosted solutions (only government can). Also, I have yet to see any such collusion holding (the only examples I can think of only sustained through government power). That’s because the bigger the injustice committed by such a collusion, the more incentive for a new entrant to break ranks and gain great popularity.
eldritch

There is no “ideal” body. Every age and every culture reinvents the “perfect” human, picks different traits and characteristics that are “beautiful”.

In Ancient Greece, extreme athleticism ruled the day, with highly stylized depictions of musculature and physical proportions for men, replete with different age specific aesthetics for younger men and older men. In certain indigenous African cultures scarification, face paint, and even elongated necks, lips, or earlobes are the epitome of beauty.

In Medieval Europe, “ideal” women were pictured as lithe, slender, meek, virginal creatures with impossibly pale skin. A few centuries later in those same European countries and cultures, during the Rennaisance, the ideal had shifted toward plump, curvaceous, ‘fertile’, and matronly women. The same two archetypes can be seen in Asian depictions in many ages, notably in Chinese and Japanese art – pale and willowy figures made up like delicate dolls, or buxom beauties drawn in such a way as to compare them to asian peaches.

Look at the 1920s, with trim and slim flappers and their “goofs”, then the 1940s and 50s with hourglass pinups bursting at the bust and butt and broad shouldered business men in powerful suits. Look at all the slender hippies of the 1960s, then the heavier disco dancers of the 1970s.

The point at which your weight matters is the point at which your life suffers because of it. What you look like shouldn’t matter – how genuinely healthy you are should. Having a heavy figure isn’t inherently unhealthy, it’s how bad your cholesteral is or how poorly your circulatory system operates or how likely you are to become sick as a direct side effect of your weight. Likewise, being thin as a rail is fine if you aren’t ruining your esophagus with stomache acid from purging or suffering fatigue or physical collapse from lack of proper nutrition. And neither body type should incite the sort of mental troubles that they often do, the self loathing and stress, the depression, all of it. It’s just needless.
- http://twitter.com/jinchoung jin choung
  
  hip to waist ratio is pretty universal though.
  - TrollyMcTrollington
    
    And youth. And symmetry. And a C-cup.
    
    The biggest joke is the disparity of ‘ideal’ body habitus as presented by the typical women’s fashion mag vs. a mainstream softcore men’s mag like Playboy. The former look like anorexic drug addicts, and probably most are.
    
    Sort of unrelated, Kim Kardashian in a slave Leia getup…..rowr!
- http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo
  
  There is no “ideal” body.
  
  There is, in that if the relevant parameters of one’s environment closely match those of pre-agricultural to pre-industrial times, the body in question will be in its evolutionary comfort zone. It’s a pretty diffuse thing, though.
http://shadowfirebird.tumblr.com shadowfirebird

“A righteous limitation of harmful contents or just another way to avoid liability by marginalizing a stigmatized subculture?”

The latter, I think. Pretty obvious that they would move somewhere else. Tumblr allegedly like to think of themselves as a site for beautiful, famous people (which to my mind would be like saying that Microsoft think of Excel as a program for scientists) — personally I try and turn a blind eye every time they add a new “feature”, change their T&C, or generally muck about with my blog, It’s getting harder, though.

Far better, IMO, to have let the sites stay but put a “health warning” stripe across the top.
bumpngrindcore

What a lot of people don’t understand is that ED is not so much about losing weight, as it is a form of neurosis. I have been a sufferer of anorexia for most of my life – it started when I was around 7 years old and stopped eating in response to having a violent and stressful home life. I was a tomboy and definitely NOT a girly-girl, hell I didn’t even know what a diet was and had no desire to be thin. It’s a way to exercise control over your body when you are powerless in every other aspect of your life, and from my experience sufferers are also the kind of people who are prone to depression and/or addictive behaviour.
Pro-ana websites seem to me to be for people who are concerned with being stupidly thin, rather than those who do genuinely suffer from ED. Like porn and other internet-related “issues” I think it comes down to parental supervision.

(And my two cents: when Jennifer Lawrence and Katy Perry are getting called fat, then there is something seriously fucked-up about our culture…)
- niktemadur
  
  When Jennifer Lawrence and Katy Perry are getting called fat, then there is something seriously fucked-up about our culture.
  
  It’s easy to visualize a magazine like Rolling Stone doing a thoughtful and hard-hitting journalistic piece on the culture of anorexia, while in the gossip section they zero-in on one of these girls and make a snide reference to “beluga” or some such thing.
  Then again, magazines with MTV-style “corporate hype” sections are schizophrenic that way, like the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, and may even regard itself unaccountable for it.
- blueelm
  
  This a thousand times. I never cared much about food either or about being pretty. In fact, I *liked* being repulsive looking. It was nice to conquer the most basic attachment we have in life and experience that kind of control.
blueelm

How can you tell which of those pictures are inspiring thin girls to look less socially ideal by harming themselves and which ones are inspiring fat girls to look more socially ideal by (let’s be honest, would you care why?)
http://twitter.com/jinchoung jin choung

people are extremely eager to invoke the “slippery slope” at every turn but here’s the thing:

- ideas can indeed be toxic

if that is true, such ideas should be eradicated. like polio.

sure, it might be difficult at times to identify that which is genuinely toxic. but such difficulty is not absolutely present in all cases. sometimes, it’s pretty clear. as it is here.

and sure, they might flee and spread elsewhere.

but we have a tendency to go defeatist far too quickly.

“you can’t stop money” they say. “money will find a way” they say. and yet we do have laws in place to fight it in things like organ donation.

things may not go as you intend but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t TRY.

yoda is wrong.

and if whackamole it must be, whackamole it should be.
- blueelm
  
  Yes, but what *ideal* is toxic here. Which one, and can you demonstrate that it is actually influencing this type of psychological symptom. Now that’s not so easy is it, or do you just stigmatize the neurosis and be done with it? Do you care about helping people, or do you care about getting crazy people out of your line of sight? Which is it?
Rider

Are they also going to ban all the crap that advocates binge drinking? How many drinking games have they banned?

Both are horrible and both lead to disease and kill people, differences is one has a huge social stigma and the other is pretty much socially accepted.
JmarD

As an avid Pinterest user and a former anorexic, I was so happy to see them cracking down on this harmful kind of image collecting. When I was going through my eating disorder the internets were still new and mostly about email. Still I fed my need with any book I could find about anorexia or eating disorders, I can’t imagine having all these sites to fuel the fire.

These disorders (self harm included) operate well with “triggers” and photos or stories of others’ experiences can do just that – trigger another episode and, in the case of eating disorders, help to more strongly lodge the disorder.

I would argue that yes, these may be normal body types – albeit thin body types – but part of the eating disorder piece (which was addressed above by another poster) is the body dysmorphic aspect of it. These may be normal body types but but for someone with a disorder, they can’t see that these images may belong to someone much younger than them or much shorter or taller than them and they may already be much thinner than the person in the photo that’s part of the issue.

Also anorexics aren’t looking to be “healthy” they are solely looking to be in control and using thinness as a measure of that control. That takes them to places where working out doesn’t cut it. When I was deepest in my disorder I was literally calculating the physical weight of a cup of water and how that would affect my own weight (not the calories, the weight of the object). That’s how messed up it can be and it can be much much worse than that.

There could be legally implications for these sites – I don’t think there should be, but I would certainly understand a family mourning the loss of their loved one with a disorder, going after such sites that were used to intensify their illness.
tmartinek

I hope that this means that they are also going to ban all blogs related to smoking, eating fatty foods, and participating in overly dangerous activities, seeing as how these can also be viewed as causing or leading to self harm. (sarcasm)
proana

I hope everyone understands that not all Pro Ana sites are supporting anorexia. Anorexia in and of itself is an image problem where the person suffering from it never feels they are thin enough no matter how thin they get. However one thing is certain, people who suffer from anorexia do indeed know how to lose weight, they just do not know when to slow down or even stop.

Some Pro Ana sites, push motivation and endorse cycling a low calorie diet in order to get rapid weight loss, they also discuss fitness and the like to keep it off.

This is just another witch hunt because the masses believes the rest are stupid and cannot make a logical decision on their own. The fact is if someone is suffering from anorexia the absence or existence of some blog somewhere makes little difference. Anorexia has been around far longer than the web, the fact that we can see it now does not mean it is any better or worse. In fact some sites, while pushing a Pro Ana diet actually speak out about the condition of anorexia.

Take a look at proana.info and see if there is one bit of negative advice on the site.