Characterizing the Content Related to Oral Health Education on TikTok

Abstract

Neglecting oral hygiene in adolescents negatively affects dental caries and periodontal diseases, in addition to social and emotional well-being. Thus, the TikTok platform (ByteDance, Beijing, China)as a social media could be a powerful channel to provide health-related information and educational content. This study aims to assess the quality of the TikTok videos corresponding to #oralhealtheducation. Sixty-nine videos were identified. Three oral health professionals (OHP), three health education professionals (HEP), and ten of TikTok’s target audience watched and evaluated the videos from a qualitative questionnaire. OHP detected false or incorrect information in 11.6% (8/69) of the videos. At least two HEPs reported being unable to detect this type of content or whether the video met dental ethics standards in both the videos. Disagreement was observed among the professionals themselves. The evaluation indicated that TikTok’s target audience was satisfied with the products viewed with an average score of >2.5, unlike the professionals, whose average score was <2.5 on a scale of 0 to 5. Users are advised to think critically and to consider the content of TikTok oral health videos with caution. The involvement of health professionals in the writing and validation of the videos could be an added value to positively respond to the needs of the adolescents.

TikTok’s Influence on Education

“…The results show that TikTok is now the most widely used social media among the higher educated person. It is also demonstrated in previous research that it is helpful for education [1][2][3][4][5]. Most people use it every day.…”

“…A social media platform that consists of videos is called TikTok [1,2]. People can create videos with various filters and currently popular tunes in under 15 seconds [3,4]. You can also upload videos you've made to websites like Twitter or Instagram [5][6][7].…”

“…They make short videos or start a live room on TikTok to teach viewers knowledge. There are many applications for using TikTok [1][2][3][4][5].…”

Higher Education Students’ Social Media Platform Preferences for Educational Purposes

“…It has started partnerships with education technology initiatives with #EduTok hashtags in order for creating educational content on the platform (Hutchinson, 2020). As a result of these initiatives it has many studies in education fields such as health education (Comp et al, 2021;Fraticelli et al, 2021;Nikookam & Guckian, 2021), sport sciences education (Escamilla-Fajardo et al, 2021), foreign language education (Pratiwi et al, & Razali, 2021), chemistry education (Hayes et al, 2020), physics education (Syah et al, 2020), IoT education (Draganić et al, 2021), museum education (Huebner, 2022), dance education (Heyang & Martin, 2022;Warburton, 2022), etc.…”

The Use of Media in Stunting Extension to Adolescents at Senior High School, Langsa City

“…Despite its success in terms of the number of users, studies to understand the use of TikTok are scarce [10]. Especially since it is unlikely that all social media search results apply to TikTok, each social media platform has a unique design, attracts different user groups [11], and causes different potentials for immersion or "addiction" [12] or misinformation. Therefore, based on the above background, this study aims to determine media use in counseling on stunting adolescents in Langsa City High School.…”