Study finds extreme amount of cancer misinformation on TikTok
Stick to dancing.
Beware of TikTok videos offering advice on women’s cancers, experts warn — the vast majority of these posts contain dangerous amounts of misinformation.
Researchers at Ohio State University discovered that the social media app’s most popular cancer-related content — very often in the form of first-person testimonials — is mostly “misleading or dramatically inaccurate.”
“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,” an announcement of their findings noted.
Alarmed medical professionals and organizations have recently been posting to the site themselves, in an effort to fight back against the tidal wave of misinformation flooding the popular social media site.
For an example, at the end of June, Dr. Laura Makaroff of The American Cancer Society posted a clip pushing back on the popular false narrative that women under 45 saw a major uptick in breast cancer between 2022 and 2023.
“Nope, not even close,” she says on camera in clip advocating for “fact vs. fiction.”
Paramus, NJ based oncologist Dr. Eleonora Teplinsky took to TikTok earlier this year to drive home the dangers of being taken in by the app’s worrisome amount of phony medical information.
“It’s dangerous and can lead to adverse outcomes,” she captioned her video.
The Post has reached out to TikTok for comment.
Ohio State’s study, which “systematically” analyzed the most popular videos related to ovarian, endometrial, cervical and vulvar cancer, in addition to gestational trophoblastic disease, sought to identify patient concerns regarding treatment that may go “unspoken” during doctor visits, according to senior author Dr. Laura Chambers.
“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,” she said.
“This data inspired a lot of questions about where to go next in addressing these inaccuracies and communicating with patients directly.”
This isn’t the first time health officials have sounded the alarm bell over bogus TikTok content — last year, so-called influencers were posting the falsehood that tampons had been linked to cancer because of titanium dioxide.
And the University of Michigan published a study in 2021, detailing a similar issue regarding misinformation on prostate cancer.
Absent tighter regulations on the quality of medical advice being passed around on TikTok, those searching for answers may be safer on YouTube, which has just launched an initiative to prevent fake cancer news by “removing content that promotes cancer treatments proven to be harmful or ineffective, or content that discourages viewers from seeking professional medical treatment,” an August announcement read.
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