The news of the Death of Thiago For It started circulating on the evening of July 21st. First a screenshot from a necrologists siteThen came videos from the profiles that commented on his story. This morning the confirmation, also arrived in sources heard by Fanpage.it. Thiago For He died at 27 from natural causes. Funerals are scheduled for tomorrow.
Thiago was a very name known on Tiktok. Was followed by beyond 140,000 followers and on his profile he had videos from millions of views. All very similar. He recovered while he was on the bed of his clinic where he was hospitalized. He told his story, his eating disorder, the relationship with his family.
It is not known what it was true and what is not. The only figure is that Thiago, a transgender boy, appeared with his face increasingly dug. His is not the only case. On Tiktok you can find a long list of profiles in which boys and girls with Food disorders They tell their illness. The videos are often viral. They attract views, generate interactions.
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The role of the story on social media
We don’t know what would happen in Thiago without social media. We only saw what happened with social networks. Even if Thiago had blocked the comments under his videos, his clips were Filming and commented. They were created secondary contentmemes and criticisms. Not only that. Someone also tried to call the clinicto enter into relation to him, to write to him in private and then reveal to the public that he had a contact with him.
The psychologist explains to Fanpage.it Giuseppe Lavenia: “Socials are not a neutral space: they reward the exposure, not healing. And often what is testimony for someone, for others it can become identification, normalization of pain or even attraction towards destructive models”. These diseases need to experts to be addressed. A video is not enough: “Young people need to understand that expressing their discomfort is fundamental, but that the cure goes from real relationships, professionals, safe places, not only from followers or views”.
What are the effects on users
These videos mainly concern Tiktok, Instagram and YouTube, the other platforms dedicated to short videos, have other problems but it seems that these content they take root less. In Italy Tiktok began to move in 2019 but it is with the Covid who exploded. We talked about it with Serena Mazzinisocial media strategist and professor: “The contents related to illness or death always get a lot of visibility. In my opinion, during Covid the platform has understood how users are fascinated by these pietistic contents that trigger one blackmail dynamicsat least from an emotional point of view “.
Mazzini is the author of the Dark side of social networks (Rizzoli, 2025). For this book he tried several times a Create fake profiles on social media To see what video they were proposed by the recommendation algorithm: “I created accounts pretending to be one 16 year old girl who was looking for advice for the diet. With any key word you ended up in front of Videos like Thiago’s“.
This exhibition also creates a emulation mechanism: “The problem is that the disease becomes a desirable lifestyle. I talked to several psychiatrists. They tell about teenagers who go to the clinic, they ask the tube to be attached to the nose and then make the videos in front of the smartphone. In Italy there are even bigger profiles than Thiago’s”.
The risk is not only for users, even those behind the videos can end up trapped in a more complex mechanism: “A subject like Thiago or like the other girls who have such profiles suffers from Egosintonic disorders: they strengthen more they are seen by the others. With this algorithm they remain trapped in their illness “.
