Previously submitted to: JMIR Formative Research (no longer under consideration since Aug 11, 2023)
Date Submitted: Dec 10, 2022
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Analysis of the Top-Ranking Opioid Use Disorder Videos on TikTok: Retrospective Observational Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Opioid use disorder is a serious medical condition becoming increasingly prevalent today, affecting over 2.1 million located in the United States and over 16 million people worldwide. The condition can be detrimental if left untreated and can gravely affect the patient’s life and those around them. Within the years, digital media has been used by many to share opinions and knowledge about health issues. OUD has not been spared from this reality. TikTok, a short video platform, has been the fastest growing application in recent years and around 1.8 billion monthly active users are expected by the end of 2022 on the Chinese application. Currently, there is a lack of research on the OUD topic on TikTok.
Objective:
The aim of this study is to explore and analyze the content and authors of the top-ranking OUD videos on the TikTok platform.
Methods:
In this retrospective observational study, TikTok videos were analyzed between July 2022 and August 2022 to evaluate the content and authors of the top ranking publicly available videos (n=509) related to opioid use disorder. Top ranking videos were chosen based on the five most common hashtags pertaining to the OUD topic on the platform, which were determined by survey analysis. Once the data was collected, videos were organized based on their content (educational, awareness, misinformation, political, humorous) and on the type of author (medical professionals, patients, relatives or friends of patients, media outlets, others). Statistical analysis used inter-rater reliability ratio.
Results:
Most videos analyzed were about awareness (62%) and the majority of authors were patients (51%). The minority of videos were about misinformation (0%) and the least represented authors were media outlets (2%). The IRR was 79.37% for content type and 79.57% for author type.
Conclusions:
Concerning the fact that most of content type was awareness and most of authors were patients, this finding could suggest that users are trying to warn others about opioid usage, having themselves gone through this form of addiction. At the time of writing, the platform does not screen for outdated videos and there is no algorithm yet to define which is obsolete or not. There is also no way of verifying if the information posted is valid or not. Clinical judgement is therefore critical when using the platform. Additional research is needed on opioid use disorder on TikTok.
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