Each year, the World Wide Web grows at a supersonic rate. Surfing web pages has become ubiquitous and almost mandatory for most of this planet’s residents, especially pre-teens, teens and young adults, also known as Generation Z, who were born between the mid-1990’s and the early 2010’s.
To no one’s surprise, this group has fully embraced TikTok, the China-based social media app that allows users to create, watch, and share short videos shot on mobile devices or webcams.
With an endless barrage of short, personalized, often quirky videos set to music and other sound effects, the short pieces have an addictive quality and high levels of engagement. It all seems fun and benign. But if you look a little deeper, you will hear another side of the story.
Many people visit TikTok for fun and to communicate with others online. But some come to the site looking for more, including information about cancer. Seeking any definitive information about a deadly disease on an entertainment site is a huge mistake and could harm you.
But the popularity of TikTok is so powerful now that it is very difficult for some to stop seeking information from these sources.
A new study revealed a few weeks ago determined that 81% of cancer cures touted by content creators on TikTok are fake, according to new research from City St. George’s, University of London.
The ethnographic study by Dr. Stephanie Alice Baker, reader in sociology, gave TikTok’s algorithm free rein to recommend videos to a user looking for cancer cures. The results were shocking. They found that only 19% of monitored videos contained legitimate medical advice.
Gen Z is particularly vulnerable to cancer misinformation, as TikTok is used as a search engine by younger demographics and is a key means of accessing health information. The platform allows creators to link to e-commerce stores and websites in which users can purchase harmful products.
In this case, TikTokers were able to benefit financially from cancer cure misinformation by selling products including oregano oil, apricot kernels, or dog dewormer (which is unsafe for human consumption). The potential for harm is enormous.
According to Backlinko – a leading resource for next-level strategies in search engine optimization, content, digital marketing, and more – TikTok has 1.04 billion monthly active users worldwide.
In the US alone, 170 million people use TikTok, and US revenue reached $16 billion in 2023. US adult users spend an average of 53.8 minutes per day on TikTok. In Q1 2024, TikTok was downloaded 137 million times.
TikTok is a global sensation. And much of it is harmless. But millions of people are getting false information, and some of it can do serious harm.
The amount of false information about health and disease is staggering and dangerous. It is arguably the most dangerous website in the world right now when it comes to cancer information.
What has me most concerned is the amount of faith young people have in these sites. Especially when they seek information about cancer or any other potentially deadly diseases.
A new study from The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute – in the journal Gynecologic Oncologys showed that millions of women are turning to the social media platform TikTok for health advice related to gynecologic cancers, but the majority of that information is misleading or dramatically inaccurate, according to the study.
Senior study author Laura Chambers, DO, said this highlights the power of social media to feed misinformation that could be harmful to patient health outcomes, but it also presents an opportunity to address gaps less likely to come up during a clinic appointment.
Chambers was interested in learning more about the unspoken concerns of her patients, who are often mothers and young women. She wanted to understand how these patients were using social media, what information they were sharing and how they are consuming that information.
“The intent of this study was to understand the needs of patients that may go unspoken in the clinic but represent gaps in care that need addressed,” Chambers, an osteopathic physician, said in her study.
“As doctors, we are focused on treatment toxicities and patient outcomes, but many of our patients are navigating really difficult challenges at home – like figuring out how to show their child love and attention when they are going through fatiguing treatments.”
The study concluded that “gynecologic cancer-related content on TikTok is of poor educational quality, and racial disparities in gynecologic cancer extend to social media. Opportunities exist to create more diverse content to support racial and cultural experiences in gynecologic cancer treatment.”
For this new study, the team systematically searched for the 500 most popular TikTok posts and analyzed the top five hashtags for each related to gynecologic cancer (ovarian, endometrial, cervical and vulvar cancers, as well as gestational trophoblastic disease) for key themes, quality of information and reliability of gynecologic cancer-related content on the social media platform.
Demographic information, message tone and thematic topics were collected. Educational videos were rated for quality using an established health education information scale.
As of August 2022, the top five hashtags for each gynecologic cancer had more than 466 million views.
The researchers found that, overall, the quality of the information being shared through TikTok was poor and at least 73% of content was inaccurate and of poor educational quality. Racial disparities in gynecologic cancer extended into this social media space.
“This data inspired a lot of questions about where to go next in addressing these inaccuracies and communicating with patients directly, especially focusing on opportunities to create more diverse content to overcome racial and cultural disparities related to treatment of these cancers,” said Chambers.
“The vulnerability shown in social media content around personal cancer journeys is inspiring, but this data really encourages us to ask, as a medical community, how we can provide a care environment that encourages that kind of trust and real conversation with patients? And what can we do, as a broader community, to provide quality health information and support services to patients seeking information about gynecologic cancers?”
Chambers encourages patients who desire a community of like-minded people going through similar experiences to seek out in-person and online support communities sponsored by reputable medical and patient advocacy organizations.
Another study looked at TikTok as a “Source of Health Information and Misinformation for Young Women in the United States.”
In the study from Ciera E Kirkpatrick, PhD, from the College of Journalism & Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, scientists conducted a survey of young women in the United States to better understand their use of TikTok for health information as well as their perceptions of TikTok’s health information and health communication sources.
The scientists concluded that “health professionals and health communication scholars need to proactively consider using TikTok as a platform for disseminating health information to young women because young women are obtaining health information from TikTok and prefer information from health professionals.”
