| Abstract: |
A substantial body of social scientific research considers the negative mental
health consequences of social media use on TikTok. Fewer, however, have
considered the potentially positive impact that mental health content creators
(“influencers”) on TikTok can have to improve health outcomes; including the
degree to which the platform exposes users to evidence-based mental health
communication. We aim to remedy this shortcoming by influencing TikTok creator
content-producing behavior via a large, within-subject field experiment (N =
105 creators with a reach of over 16 million TikTok followers; N = 3, 465
unique videos). Our randomly-assigned field intervention exposed influencers
on the platform to either (a) asynchronous digital (.pdf) toolkits, or (b)
both toolkits and synchronous virtual training sessions that aimed to promote
effective evidence-based mental health communication (relative to a control
condition, exposed to neither intervention). We find that creators treated
with our asynchronous toolkits – and, in some cases, those also attending
synchronous training sessions – were significantly more likely to (i) feature
evidence-based mental health content in their videos and (ii) generate video
content related to mental health issues. Moderation analyses further reveal
that these effects are not limited to only those creators with followings
under 2 million users. Importantly, we also document large system-level
effects of exposure to our interventions; such that TikTok videos featuring
evidence-based content received over half a million additional views in the
post-intervention period in the study’s treatment groups, while mental health
content (in general) received over two million additional views. We conclude
by discussing how simple and cost-effective interventions like ours can be
deployed at scale to influence mental health content production on TikTok. |