Too Much On Top of Your Food Drama: Food Allergy Information and Identity Work on Social Media

This project explores how people with food allergies use social media to shape their health habits, identities, and social connections. Through 18 interviews with content creators and consumers who live with food allergies, we found that social media can both empower and stigmatize, influencing how individuals express themselves and manage their visibility online.

We introduce the idea of “on-and-off identities” to describe how people shift between sharing and hiding their food allergy identity on algorithm-driven platforms. Our study offers design directions for creating mindful social media experiences that support both agency and vulnerability in health and identity work.

Different on and off:

From left to right: People can focus on certain aspects of their food allergy identities to be seen. They can make some of it invisible. They can also blur it with forms of content that are popular and typical on social media platforms.