Social media has gained prominence over the years - not just in the Western world, but across Asian nations.

Despite the growing prevalence of social media in developing countries of South Asia, most research has examined the consumer behaviours of Western countries (Mir, 2012). Moreover, the use of social media is most popular amongst the youth, with ages ranging from 15-24 years in South Asian countries (Tapsell, 2020), which is similar to their Western counterparts (Ofcom, 2019).

One of the most popular and researched areas is that of the relationship between social media use and body image, for example, Poorani (2012) who conducted a review of body image literature in India observed that women and girls were more vulnerable to body dissatisfaction when exposed to unrealistic beauty standards and unhealthy eating attitudes on social media.

Much like in the West, it has been found that social media platforms where posting pictures and videos of thin ideals and unrealistic beauty standards are found to be quite harmful to body satisfaction and eating disorders for women (Khan et al., 2011; Nagar et al., 2017; Poorani, 2012).

Amongst many of the social media platforms that function mainly on image-based activity, TikTok, a platform where users share their own videos ranging from political issues to dance challenges (Abidin et al., 2022) is one of the most popular platforms used in South Asia, with over 1.2 billion monthly active users worldwide (Iqbal, 2022). Joiner et al. (2022) studied the relationship between body dissatisfaction and TikTok use among mainly Caucasian women to understand if there was any significance and found statistically significant results.

This study aims to replicate the same with a South Asian sample.