Distrust by default: analysis of parent and child reactions to health misinformation exposure on TikTok

ABSTRACT

Social networks have become a recurrent source of health information, but they also represent a space for the dissemination of erroneous or false information, which becomes more worrying when dealing with underage audiences. The aim of this study was to find out what resources and capabilities adolescents have to deal with the erroneous health content they receive through TikTok. To provide a comprehensive perspective, one of the parents of each sampled child was also interviewed with the aim of discovering their assessment of how their children dealt with this content. 40 interviews were carried out, and among the main findings, a common practice of distrust by default of the contents consumed on the Internet stood out, both in adults and in minors. While the latter always sought in the content an occasion to entertain themselves, parents doubted that their children were capable of recognizing erroneous information.

KEYWORDS:

• misinformation
• TikTok
• adolescents
• parents
• health content
• critical thinking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. @javierlopezmontiel, with 114.2K followers: https://www.tiktok.com/search?q=javierlopezmontiel&t=1678877357709

2. @farmaceuticofernandez, with 2.6 M followers. https://www.tiktok.com/search?q=farmaceuticofernandez&t=1678877506924

3. transcription: ‘You are not able to swallow a pill’; ‘Put it in a syringe with some water’; ‘Plug the hole and pull several times, with pressure’; and ‘It falls apart whole’

4. transcription: ‘Tablets cannot be crushed or dissolved without consulting a doctor or pharmacist’; ‘Some are designed to take hours to dissolve completely, and if you crush them you alter the release of the active ingredient’; and ‘If you crush them you impair the coating and thus absorption of the drug and its efficacy’

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of the Government of Spain underI+D+i Project ref. PID2020‐116841RA‐I00. Research also funded by the Research Plan of the International University of La Rioja (UNIR), 2020–2022 biennium.

Notes on contributors

Beatriz Feijoo

Beatriz Feijoo Associate professor of advertising and marketing at the School of Business and Communication, International University of La Rioja (Spain). Her research focuses on communication and children, the use of screens in new generations, and more recently on the relationship between minors and advertising through the mobile devices. She is also the principal investigator of funded research projects on the same subject (Fondecyt N°11170336 - Chile; ADKIDSMOBILE - R+D+i project with ref. PID2020-116841RA-I00; PENSACRIGITAL-UNIR; DIGITAL_FIT-Fundación Mapfre).

Charo Sádaba

Luisa Zozaya Professor at the Faculty of Business and Communication at UNIR and is finishing her PHD at University of Navarra, Spain. Her research interests are the behaviour of children, teenagers, and young adults in the digital environment, advertising literacy for minors on social media, and the ethical implications of content shared by digital content creators. She has a master’s degree in Social Science from the University of Sonora in México.

Luisa Zozaya

Charo Sádaba Full professor of advertising and marketing at the School of Communication, University of Navarra (Spain). Her research has been focused on the impact of digitalization on children and teenagers, their behavior, attitudes and opinions towards technology, particularly in Spain and Latin American countries. More recently she has started a project on the impact of technology in emerging adulthood.