The broad reach and inaccuracy of men’s health information on social media: analysis of TikTok and Instagram

Social media (SoMe) offers great potential to expand access to health information, but a significant proportion of users consume its content instead of consulting a physician. We sought to quantify the volume and characterize the accuracy of men’s health-related content on TikTok and Instagram. We s...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of impotence research 2024-05, Vol.36 (3), p.256-260
Main Authors: Dubin, Justin M., Aguiar, Jonathan A., Lin, Jasmine S., Greenberg, Daniel R., Keeter, Mary Kate, Fantus, Richard J., Pham, Minh N., Hudnall, Matthew T., Bennett, Nelson E., Brannigan, Robert E., Halpern, Joshua A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
692/699/2732/515
692/699/2743/1526
Accuracy
Connective tissue diseases
Erectile dysfunction
Medicine
Medicine & Public Health
Penis
Reproductive Medicine
rology
Social networks
Urology
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Summary:Social media (SoMe) offers great potential to expand access to health information, but a significant proportion of users consume its content instead of consulting a physician. We sought to quantify the volume and characterize the accuracy of men’s health-related content on TikTok and Instagram. We searched TikTok and Instagram for the terms: testosterone, erectile dysfunction, male infertility, semen retention, Peyronie’s disease, and vasectomy. The top 10 hashtags for each term were used to estimate the total impressions for each term on each platform, and posts were then characterized by creator type, content type, and accuracy (1 to 5 scale). TikTok had 2,312,407,100 impressions and Instagram had 3,107,300 posts across all topics. Semen retention had the most impressions on TikTok (1,216,074,000) and posts on Instagram (1,077,000). Physicians created only a small portion of total TikTok and Instagram posts (10.3% and 12.9%, respectively). Across all topics, the accuracy of content was poor (2.6 ± 1.7), however, physician posts were more accurate than non-physician posts (mean 4.2 ± 1.2 vs 2.3 ± 1.6, p  
ISSN:0955-9930
1476-5489
DOI:10.1038/s41443-022-00645-6