My name is Danielle Vogue, along with my colleague Caroline Kreitzer and I, we are presenting our work, TikTok Teachings on Pregnancy and Labor, a Mixed Method Evaluation of Pregnancy Related Videos and Misinformation on the Social Media Platform. Thank you so much for evaluating our project, we're very excited to share this work. Many of us in our day-to-day lives have seen that social media is an increasingly popular platform to engage in health-related matters. A recent study surveying Gen Z specifically highlighted that that is where they seek out most of their health information. A study done this year in 2024, looking at young women specifically, said that most in their day-to-day lives are interfacing with social media platforms like TikTok, whether intentionally or unintentionally. One subject where there is a lot of commentary and posts are about pregnancy and childbirth. We know that pregnancy and childbirth is a very significant life event, many patients and partners have questions, so it can be a positive place to get more information. However, TikTok specifically is an unregulated platform, anyone can post anything they want, they can say who they are without any backing, and there is no way for the average user to evaluate if what is being said is accurate. So that creates the potential for misinformation, and a lot of people, particularly those of childbearing age and those who may be pregnant or become pregnant, are interacting with information of uncertain quality, and this could put patients at harm, it could put their pregnancy outcomes at risk by increasing stress, encouraging harmful behaviors, discouraging medical interventions, and so it is critical to understand what the content is available to patients, and if it is accurate, what the content is, and who is posting it. So our project in here was to characterize the content and assess the quality of information shared by TikTok authors sharing educational videos about pregnancy and postpartum care. The way we went about this, we used a program called TikTok Scraper to pull videos on the For You page of TikTok as if we were a young person just participating on TikTok and looking up a video about pregnancy. We used the keyword pregnancy education. We then selected those only relevant to pregnancy and intended for education. This yielded 200 videos. Then what we did in this case was both a qualitative and a quantitative analysis. So we had four researchers on this project, two medical students, myself and Caroline, a OBGYN resident and an OBGYN attending, and so all four of us evaluated each of these videos from a qualitative perspective. We applied codes to each video to represent the video content and then developed emerging themes from that work. We also identified the video author, so self-reported content creator. This included physician, midwife, allied health professional, doula, patient or other. This allowed us to stratify versus healthcare worker or non-healthcare worker, so physicians, midwives, allied health professionals in that healthcare worker space. Then we used three validated instruments to evaluate for content quality, accuracy, understandability and actionability. So the instruments here were applied to each of those videos by all four researchers. So when we look at the results, there are some highlights that we want to point out. Videos about pregnancy lifestyle and labor delivery were the most frequently posted. You can see this here on the left-hand side on figure A. You can see within those subjects the sub-themes that were most discussed. So in labor delivery, there was a strong focus on vaginal delivery and labor complications less so. When we talk about pregnancy lifestyle, there was a strong focus on a few things, particularly nutrition in yoga and exercise. When we look at who is making these videos, the majority are non-healthcare professionals. So I'll point you to table A here, 61.2% were non-healthcare professionals, the majority of that group being doulas. Within our healthcare professionals, the majority were allied health professionals, about 25% within that group. And then physicians were in the minority, and within that, there were no self-reported osteopathic physicians in this group, all identified as MDs. We found a significant difference in content quality and accuracy. So not only were videos produced by healthcare workers more accurate, they also were better in quality as well. And this is interesting because there was significantly higher engagement in the videos posted by non-healthcare workers. So the majority of folks are seeing non-healthcare worker videos that are less accurate and worse in quality as well. We found across the board that there were videos that had concrete misinformation. Some examples of this were about neonatal interventions, particularly highlighting that there are risks and no benefit to using erythromycin on the neonate after delivery, discouraging patients from getting group B strep testing, discouraging patients from having the hepatitis B vaccine, discouraging patients from vitamin K injections. All of these elements were highlighted by videos, particularly non-healthcare professionals. There's some interesting elements to consider. One, we found that there are many videos containing misleading and inaccurate information as discussed. These are at times some of the most engaged videos, and that is of concern for us as physicians that patients are engaging with this material that's inaccurate. Further, the best quality videos by physicians are the least engaged with. So that asks a question, how can, if physicians are interested, engage on these platforms and gather more engagement? Further, no osteopathic physicians were found in this top 200 videos. Osteopathic physicians that care for patients that are pregnant, whether they are OBGYNs or family medicine physicians, should consider how they can be a part of this conversation. Another element to consider is how sites like TikTok could label information. So sites really need to address misinformation in some way, whether that's disclaimers, restrictions, whether there's ways to verify education. And then the areas where we talked about the most engagement could identify patient knowledge gaps. So the areas that we talked about specifically were vaginal delivery and nutrition. Those were some big, big topics for patients. Maybe that's a moment where physicians and other healthcare providers need to take a step back and talk to their patients more often. And then finally, patients and clinicians should partner and discuss conflicting inaccurate messages from TikTok. So in the exam room, asking if patients are using social media to research their pregnancy, talking it through, engaging and opening that door to say, you know, not all the information you're going to see online is accurate. If you have questions about what you should be doing or about your own health or what you've seen, please bring them to me. Thank you so much to listening to our poster. We are so grateful for your time and we wish you the best.

TikTok

pregnancy misinformation

healthcare professionals

social media

neonatal interventions