‘Influencing the Influencers’: How TikTok Can Promote Positive Mental Health .

‘Influencing the Influencers’: How TikTok Can Promote Positive Mental Health
In a new study, Matt Motta and researchers partnered with mental health content influencers on TikTok for a field experiment that examined how health experts and social media influencers can work together to make evidence-based mental health information available to young audiences on the wildly popular app.
Despite the proliferation of misinformation online and growing data on the harms social media may pose to youth mental health, young people continue to turn to apps such as TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat for health information. Recent polling suggests that as many as one-third of GenZers seek health advice on TikTok, and one in five consult the app before their doctors when seeking treatment.
Given the significant trust that young people place in TikTok, researchers at the School of Public Health and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health recently conducted a field experiment to understand the extent to which the wildly popular app could provide positive and accurate mental health messaging and resources by sharing evidence-based mental health information with established social media influencers.
The findings, published in Scientific Reports, a journal in the Nature portfolio, were promising.
Partnering with 105 mental health influencers on TikTok, the team provided the influencers with digital “toolkits” that included asynchronous and/or synchronous training on how to incorporate evidence-based mental health content into the videos they produce. The interventions increased viewership of mental health content on TikTok by more than three million views throughout the study period, including more than 800,000 additional views on videos that include evidence-based mental health content compared to similar TikTok posts before the study period.
“We recognize that robust literature suggests a link between increased social media use and negative mental health outcomes, but our research at least raises the possibility that social media can also be a force for good,” says study lead and corresponding author Matt Motta, assistant professor of health law, policy & management. “By working with mental health content creators—rather than against them, by casting doubt on their intentions or academic credentials, for example—we believe that we can help transform socially mediated spaces into places that promote evidence-based mental health content.”
The study is the first of its kind to use randomized controlled trial methods to collaborate directly with TikTok creators to promote evidence-based mental health content.
To conduct the study, the researchers selected mental health content creators on TikTok who were 18 and older and had a wide reach on the platform, with a collective total of 8.5 million followers, from April 2023 to May 2023. They emphasized influencers whose audiences were primarily from populations that disproportionately face barriers in accessing healthcare, including Black, Latinx, Asian, and LGBTQ+ creators.
The team randomly assigned provided some of the creators to receive a pdf document of mental health content training. Another group of influencers received both the pdf and a video of training materials, and a control group that received no materials. The evidence-based materials focused on five core themes: lack of mental healthcare access, maternal health issues, the connection between physical and mental health, structural racism and discrimination, and climate change.
The group of influencers who received the document-only training materials were most likely to incorporate the information into their TikTok videos, suggesting that this simple intervention could possibly increase positive mental health messaging on TikTok, and that it could also be an effective tool for mental health influencers to apply as they develop content on other social media platforms (and, incidentally, that the current push to ban TikTok in the US will likely have some impact on how young people receive health information).
“We think that the approach we take up in this paper is broadly scalable to a wide range of topics both within and beyond mental health,” Motta says. “We’re already planning to use similar methods to work with influencers to provide young people with evidence-based ‘peer support’ skills, and to combat misinformation about diet and exercise.”
The team also plans to use these methods to combat vaccine hesitancy by promoting evidence-based vaccine science and debunking common misbeliefs about vaccine safety and efficacy.
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