Is TikTok The Next Social Media Frontier for Medicine?

With 72% of the public participating in at least one social media platform, technology has become influential in allowing online communities to interact and share information surrounding similar problems, solutions, and insights. Social media platforms represent some of the most recent communityoriented applications allowing Lave and Wegner’s original concept of “communities of practice” (CoP) to be expanded beyond the walls of an institution. These virtual communities allow for users to develop, retrieve, and explore content generated by others at their convenience irrespective of time or place. The wide range of available platforms facilitates the sharing and distribution of knowledge in a variety of formats. The medical education CoP has harnessed the influence of social media to enhance relationships and to share, discuss, and debate a wide variety of interests and key issues with colleagues and experts from around the world. The field of public health has successfully harnessed these CoP and the wide-reaching abilities of social media to deliver information to the public, most recently apparent during the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. TikTok, a videobased social media platform, has recently been described as a new potential platform to disseminate public health information amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the app’s wide-reaching influence, with over 800 million users worldwide and an average use of 52 minutes a day, it is an ideal platform to disseminate information to a large group of people. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many news outlets discussed the use of TikTok by medical professionals to disseminate facts and dispel myths related to the disease. Many users of the app itself have also developed content to help clarify questions about the disease. These videos have reached millions of viewers and gained popularity, most notably a video receiving more than one million views on how to properly don and doff gloves. In fact, a manual search of the hashtag “coronavirus” on the TikTok app returns 90 billion views, demonstrating the extensive reach of this platform. TikTok’s public health impact is seen beyond the COVID-19 pandemic as well. A search performed within the TikTok application revealed the hashtags “medicine” and “doctor” received 1.4 billion and 6.7 billion views, respectively. Medical professionals, such as Dr. Rose Marie Leslie (@drleslie), have used the platform to share videos with the public on topics ranging from vaping-associated lung injury and the importance of a primary care doctor to her video explaining symptoms of COVID-19, which has been viewed 4.3 million times. Another anonymous account (@medicineexplained), dedicated to soliciting and answering common medical questions from the community, boasts 1.1 million followers with over 16 million likes. The same profile has less than 1,000 Instagram followers and 127 YouTube subscribers, representing an example where content and target audience can differ between TikTok and other social media tools.