Recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) put out a press release detailing their upcoming collaboration with TikTok, which they innocuously describe as ‘a platform for short-form mobile videos’. Intended to last one year, this partnership is intended to improve the accessibility and reliability of information shared online about health – most of all, by uplifting information which is fact-checked and evidence-based.

In the release, WHO underlines its intention to adapt to a young, mostly digital audience – it understands that social media has become a key information source for one in four young adults, and that this reliance on social media is likely to be reflected in many people’s decision-making and behaviours pertaining to their health. ‘See a doctor, don’t Google your symptoms’ people might say – but Googling is certainly quicker and requires less mobilisation than making and then attending a GP appointment. In their release, the WHO also acknowledges (lightly) the risks posed by misinformation which young people may encounter in online spaces such as TikTok – as the global authority on health, it is certainly in the WHO’s interests to address potentially dangerous barriers to health information posed by the unregulated digitisation of young people’s communities. WHO Chief Scientist Dr Jeremy Farrar even talks about the need to make sure that (online) platforms are ‘socially responsible’. 

Social media is often heralded as having played a hand in recent shortfalls of health literacy, with online discussion of vaccines considered particularly inflammatory. A 2023 survey of American adults found that they were less likely to trust vaccines than they had been two years earlier. Researchers propose that social media may well feed on a wide-scale vulnerability towards misinformation caused by increased political polarisation and distrust in science, as well as an exacerbation of health inequalities. As a result, social media users fall into ‘information silos’: online spaces which we curate to concur with our own values and beliefs, with no room for contradictory perspectives. Among older adults, Facebook has been compared to a ‘battleground’ of misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines; with TikTok now the social media channel of choice among young people, researchers in health literacy have a new target. A study from the University of Chicago performed a systematic analysis of health-based TikTok videos, to try and scope the full extent of the problem: nearly half of videos were found to contain ‘non-factual information’; of these videos, most were produced by influencers whose backgrounds were not in health sciences. 

It would seem that WHO’s approach to addressing this problem is to challenge it head-on, by collaborating with TikTok directly. Possibly inspired by the impressive reach of influencers, WHO have assembled a team of their own: in 2020 they launched their Fides network of over 800 ‘health content creators’, which TikTok now intend to work alongside. WHO’s Director of Digital Health and Innovation, Dr Alain Labrique, says as much: ‘Creators who understand their audience’s needs have a unique opportunity to bridge the gap between science and real life’. WHO’s plan to combat poor health literacy is evidently not to fight back against the inevitable age of the influencer, but rather to model it in their own image – the success of ‘WHOfluencers’ will need to be measured by research studies in the coming years, but so far it demonstrates pragmatism. Improving health literacy is among the WHO’s primary interests, and as such, it may require a novel strategy to address the alarming downwards trend in young people’s health literacy, to avoid long-term consequences. 

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