DDW 2023: TikTok Posts About Cirrhosis, Liver Disease Often Inaccurate
Nearly 40 percent of posts about cirrhosis and liver disease contain misinformation
MONDAY, May 15, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- About 40 percent of posts about cirrhosis or liver disease on the short-form video hosting service TikTok contain misinformation, according to research findings presented at the 2023 Digestive Disease Week, held from May 6 to 9 in Chicago.
“TikTok is the social media platform for Millennials and Generation Z,” Macklin Loveland, M.D., of the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson, told Elsevier’s PracticeUpdate. “Liver disease and cirrhosis are poorly understood among those populations as well as the general population. Physicians should play a larger role on the TikTok platform to ensure TikTok users are receiving accurate information.”
Loveland and colleagues used the TikTok search function to identify posts about “cirrhosis” and “liver disease” from Oct. 1, 2022, to Nov. 25, 2022. They categorized the posts as purely educational or depicting firsthand experience with cirrhosis or liver disease, and classified each post as accurate or misinformation based on professional society guidelines.
The search yielded 2,223 posts related to cirrhosis or liver disease, of which 1,340 were determined to be accurate, while 883 were misinformation. Posts with accurate information had an average of 120,737 views, 14,463 likes, 271.1 comments, and 364.8 shares. Posts with misinformation had an average of 53,316 views, 1,671 likes, 42.2 comments, and 140.8 shares.
Loveland told Elsevier’s PracticeUpdate that the majority of inaccurate posts came from educational TikTok accounts that are not run by physicians, “health professional” accounts, or accounts managed by individuals attempting to sell a product to treat liver disease or cirrhosis.
“There are great accounts that show firsthand experiences of living with liver disease that I believe are valuable for health professionals to see how they live and what they go through,” Loveland told Elsevier’s PracticeUpdate. “I hope that more physicians get involved on the TikTok platform to increase the accurate information on TikTok as the platform itself does not seem to have safeguards in place for health-related misinformation.”
Click on any of these tags to subscribe to Topic Alerts. Once subscribed, you can get a single, daily email any time PracticeUpdate publishes content on the topics that interest you.
Visit your Preferences and Settings section to Manage All Topic Alerts