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Search for the word “fat” on Twitter and you’ll likely find a torrent of criticisms, insults, and jokes at overweight people’s expense. Now researchers have undertaken such an experiment in a much more systematic way, across a variety of platforms — and what they’ve found may give the public health community a look at the reality of being overweight online.

For a study published in the journal Translational Behavioral Medicine, the researchers Wen-Ying Sylvia Chou, Abby Prestin, and Stephen Kunath analyzed a variety of social-media messages — tweets, Facebook posts, and comments on blogs and forums — that contained words like “obese,” “overweight,” and “fat.” “The most prevalent theme” throughout these messages, they write, “is derogation and stigma against overweight individuals.” They noticed “moral repugnance toward overweight people,” “irritation and anger” directed at them, and, in more extreme cases, harassment. Tweets “where aggressors directly and publicly attack other users with weight-related insults,” they write, “are unfortunately common.”

Twitter as a whole, they write, “appears to be a unique channel that potentially perpetuates and enables terse and insensitive flaming or aggressive cyberbullying.” Among the most retweeted messages involving words like “fat” or “overweight” were jokes denigrating overweight people.

Users also tended to fault individuals themselves for being overweight, rather than considering their circumstances. “I’m trained in part in public health,” Ms. Chou told Op-Talk, “and we think a lot about environmental factors, policy, social and system-level factors, and that did not come up much” in the data. Instead, much online conversation took the view that “the individuals are to blame.”

Ms. Chou was also struck by the misogyny she and her coauthors found. She noted that the word “fat” commonly appeared along with “girl,” “lady,” or sexist terms. “If you’re overweight and a woman, you’re targeted so much more” than men are, she said. “It was really an undercurrent that couldn’t be ignored.”

The findings came as no surprise to Virgie Tovar, an author and activist who started the hashtag #LoseHateNotWeight. She told Op-Talk that after an interview with her appeared on Yahoo! Health, “a dedicated number of people went onto my Instagram feed, and every single person who had ever hashtagged #LoseHateNotWeight got personally attacked by these people.”

“What’s interesting about this study is it gives a portrait, a snapshot of the general hostility online,” she said. “My experience is there is a dedicated group of people who are very explicitly interested in stalking and terrorizing fat people.”

The authors’ findings about misogyny especially resonated with her. “‘Fat’ has become this catchall word for all of the various hot-button issues we as a culture are metabolizing and dealing with,” she said. “The study really clearly shows the connection between our anxiety around women, our anxiety around women’s rights” and weight stigma.

While women’s bodies were once treated as the property of men, she said, “we’re in a different era now around women having autonomy,” and “that creates deep cultural anxiety.”

“When women get to choose what their body size is, and they get to choose what they eat and they get to choose what kind of clothes they wear, this is indicating a major paradigm shift,” she added. “I think you’ve consistently seen backlash from the culture any time a woman tries to stake autonomy.”

And, she argued, weight-related prejudice could hurt women of color especially severely. “When you take into account the preexisting stigma around race and gender and then you add the fat piece, you’re talking about a stigma load that could be really, really potentially harmful.”

Ms. Chou noted that psychological research has documented the ill effects of weight stigma: “Shaming is not a solution. It’s not going to make people get healthier.”

She hopes her research will offer something that’s been missing from some public-health campaigns around obesity: a real understanding of what overweight people face as they move through the world. “The online environment I think in some ways mirrors the experience of people who struggle with weight,” she said. “We don’t think about that enough in public health. You wear your body, so you can’t even hide it, even online when there’s so much just unknown.”

Her study did reveal some positive developments, including users fighting back against fat-shaming (one said, “The only ‘overweight’ thing about Adele is her paycheck!”). She and her co-authors also mention Lady Gaga and other celebrities who use their social-media influence to combat stigma. Ms. Chou suggested that organizations like the C.D.C. might even seek to partner with celebrities: “I think we need to think more creatively about who’s already getting the following, and maybe leveraging those networks.”

For her part, Ms. Tovar wants the kind of stigma the study revealed to be turned on its head. “I would like to see fatphobia and fatphobic remarks being treated in the same way as any other form of bullying and violence,” she said. While in some places today “making fun of fat people makes you the funny person in the room,” she added, “I’d like to make it such that you become the ostracized person in the room.”