Trial reportScientific reports2024
"Influencing the influencers:" a field experimental approach to promoting effective mental health communication on TikTok.
Trial report in Scientific reports, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 36 citations in OpenAlex.
- How have contemporary research studies used social media to recruit to digital self-help intervention research for young people's mental health?: a mapping review.BMC medical research methodology · 2025Pooled it
- Exploring Problematic TikTok Use and Mental Health Issues: A Systematic Review of Empirical Studies.Journal of primary care & community healthPooled it
- Misinformation mayhem: the effects of TikTok content on ADHD knowledge, stigma, and treatment-seeking intentions.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2025Trial
- Depictions of Depression in Generative AI Video Models: Mixed Methods Study of OpenAI's Sora 2.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Article
- Feasibility and cost of partnering with social media influencers to promote colorectal cancer screening.Health education research · 2026Article
- Tick-Tock, the Time Has Come: Leveraging TikTok to Understand, Prevent, and Treat Eating Disorders.The International journal of eating disorders · 2026Review
- A Comparison of Participant Demographics Across Co-Designed Recruitment Methods to Two Student Mental Health Trials: Cross-Sectional Observational Study.JMIR formative research · 2026Observational
- "My eating disorder story": an interpretative phenomenological analysis of social media, narrative identity, and patient influencers in eating disorder recovery.Journal of eating disorders · 2026Article
- Influencing the Influencers: How Health Experts Are Partnering With Content Creators to Fight Misinformation Online.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Article
- "You Say Cognitive, I Say Cognitive": Can Misinformation-Informed Interventions Help Reduce Risk for Disordered Eating in Youth?The International journal of eating disorders · 2026Article
- Leveraging Influencers to Reach and Engage Vulnerable Individuals With a Digital Health Intervention: Quasi-Experimental Field Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2025Article
- Digital Opinion Leadership in the Age of Social Media and Generative AI: A Vision for the Future of Health Communication Science.NAM perspectives · 2025Article
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- How influencers motivate inactive adolescents to be more physically active: a mixed methods study.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
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- Article
- "It's really hard to strike a balance": The role of digital influencers in shaping youth mental health.Digital healthArticle
- Relatability versus responsibility: Social media influencers on their roles in youth mental health.Digital healthArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A substantial body of social scientific research considers the negative mental health consequences of social media use on TikTok. Fewer, however, consider 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. Our novel, influencer-led approach remedies this shortcoming by attempting to change TikTok creator content-producing behavior via a large, within-subject field experiment (N = 105 creators with a reach of over 16.9 million viewers; N = 3465 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 treatment group mental health content (in general) received over three million additional views. We conclude by discussing how simple, cost-effective, and influencer-led interventions like ours can be deployed at scale to influence mental health content on TikTok.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.