Research LetterMedication abortion on TikTok: misinformation or reliable resource?
Section snippets
Objective
TikTok, a short-form video-sharing application, is a popular platform used by 50.3% of the United States digital population.1 Viral videos promoting non–US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved regimens for inducing abortion have raised questions regarding the safety and accuracy of reproductive health information.2 We systematically analyzed and evaluated videos about medication abortion on TikTok.
Study Design
We evaluated the 100 most-viewed videos tagged under the hashtags #abortionpill, #medicalabortion, and #medicationabortion. We used the web-scraping application, Apify, to automatically download, extract, and compile information from the 100 most-viewed videos under each hashtag on September 25, 2022.3 Three independent reviewers (E.T., M.H., and M.G.) performed standardized video coding and a fourth reviewer (J.W.) served as arbitrator when differences arose. We a priori defined 18 descriptive
Results
The top 100 videos about medication abortion on TikTok had a total of 12.1 million views, 1.8 million likes, and averaged 57 seconds in length. Eighteen videos were excluded because they were not in English language (n=10) or were duplicates (n=8). More than half (58%) of the videos provided medical education followed by personal experiences (13%), opinions (7%), and news-related information (7%) (Table). Abortion services accounts created 30% of the videos and often featured healthcare
Conclusion
Almost 40% of young people search on TikTok before Google, yet 1 previous investigation concluded that up to 20% of videos contain misinformation.2 In contrast, we found that content related to medication abortion on TikTok was accurate and reliable. This may be attributable to TikTok’s internal policies for flagging inaccurate or unverified information as well as the significant number of videos by healthcare professionals and abortion organizations. Videos on medication abortion were of
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The findings of this study will be presented at the 46th annual meeting of the National Abortion Federation being held in Denver, Colorado, April 29-May 2, 2023.
The authors report no conflict of interest.
This study was supported by funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development under award number K12HD103083. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. J.J.S. reports receiving personal fees as a contraceptive implant placement trainer for Organon.