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BALTIMORE -- While YouTube has more anti-abortion content than TikTok, both social media platforms had similar proportions of videos that contained medical misinformation, a cross-sectional study showed.

Among 280 videos from May 2022, those on YouTube were 4.5 times more likely to contain strongly anti-abortion content compared with those on TikTok (P<0.05), reported Ciara Dobrowolski, a medical student at Albany Medical College in New York, during a poster presentation at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) annual meeting.

Notably, YouTube and TikTok had similar proportions of videos that contained medical misinformation (10.1% vs 5.4%, P=0.137), and videos on both platforms that contained misinformation were 3.9 times (95% CI 1.14-13.43) more likely to be strongly anti-abortion.

The researchers noted that half of U.S. adults get their news from social media.

"Especially for younger patients, I think people come in with a lot of social media background, and you can definitely get a misconception about a topic based on what you see on social media," Dobrowolski said.

She told 乌鸦传媒 that "there's definitely room for providers and clinical information scientists to do work and prevent medical misinformation on social media platforms."

"Each platform had very little medical information content on it. So I think there's definitely a lot of room for providers to share information and increase their proportion of information so that patients come in with a more informed, reliable background," she added.

Dobrowolski said that she's planning to conduct the study again later this year, since the state of abortion access has changed so drastically over the last year.

"We're going to basically repeat the study and then we'll have more data to be able to compare how this has changed over the course of the year and how each platform evolved," she said.

For this study, the researchers searched the term "abortion" on both YouTube and TikTok on May 2, 2022, and saved the URLs of the first 155 videos on each platform.

Dobrowolski told 乌鸦传媒 that she finished saving the URLs mere hours before the draft Supreme Court decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade, meaning that this research is a snapshot of abortion content on social media before it was confirmed that people in the U.S. would lose the federal right to an abortion.

Of the 310 videos collected, 280 were included in the analysis, with 143 on TikTok and 137 on YouTube. The researchers used new accounts when searching on both platforms to minimize algorithmic bias.

The content of each video was categorized on a 5-point scale ranging from strongly pro-abortion to strongly anti-abortion, defined as "overtly expressing pro- or anti-abortion support, information, or sentiment."

The researchers also categorized the videos by type of content, including medical education, legal information, political information, personal experience, news, or other. The presence of any medical misinformation was also noted.

On TikTok, there were nearly equal proportions of videos detailing personal experience and political information (41% and 39%, respectively), with only 6% containing medical education and 3% containing legal information. YouTube had fewer videos containing personal experience, at 15%; 25% of videos contained political information, 16% included medical education, and 9% included legal information. News content was much higher on YouTube than TikTok (34% vs 1%, respectively).

Limitations to the study include the rapidly changing nature of social media, as well as poorly understood social media algorithms.

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