INTRODUCTION
The role of social media in patient education continues to grow; approximately 80% of internet users in the United States have searched online for health information.1 With this growth, there are increasing opportunities for dermatologists to use social media as a patient education platform, as well as challenges.2 One of the most popular social media applications today is TikTok, which as of June 2021 had accumulated over 1 billion users and has been downloaded over 200 million times in the United States alone.3 TikTok gives its users a platform to share and view short videos on a wide range of topics, including dermatology related topics. Villa-Ruiz et al examined the top viewed dermatology-related videos on TikTok and reported that patient-experience and educational videos dominate the content of said videos, the majority posted by patients at 48%, followed by board certified dermatologists at 25.8%.4
Our study sought to analyze the sources of TikTok videos containing content related to treatment and educational material of four top dermatologic conditions. Selection of conditions was guided by the American Academy of Dermatology Association and included acne, eczema, psoriasis, and rosacea.5 We also sought to use a greater sample size than previous dermatologic TikTok studies and to share the breakdown of sources for each condition to examine how sources may differ depending on the condition searched. In our search, we thought to keep TikTok's pre-set search result filters of "all time" for date posted and "relevance" for sorting to most closely mimic the results that users would come across when searching for treatment of the study’s four dermatologic conditions. We used the following four hashtags, #AcneTreatment, #EczemaTreatment, #PsoriasisTreatment, and #RosaceaTreatment to generate a sample of 100 videos per hashtag. The samples were then categorized by their source to analyze the percentage of videos that were posted by dermatologists, dermatology residents, and other licensed professionals versus all other posters.
Our study sought to analyze the sources of TikTok videos containing content related to treatment and educational material of four top dermatologic conditions. Selection of conditions was guided by the American Academy of Dermatology Association and included acne, eczema, psoriasis, and rosacea.5 We also sought to use a greater sample size than previous dermatologic TikTok studies and to share the breakdown of sources for each condition to examine how sources may differ depending on the condition searched. In our search, we thought to keep TikTok's pre-set search result filters of "all time" for date posted and "relevance" for sorting to most closely mimic the results that users would come across when searching for treatment of the study’s four dermatologic conditions. We used the following four hashtags, #AcneTreatment, #EczemaTreatment, #PsoriasisTreatment, and #RosaceaTreatment to generate a sample of 100 videos per hashtag. The samples were then categorized by their source to analyze the percentage of videos that were posted by dermatologists, dermatology residents, and other licensed professionals versus all other posters.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
On July 16th, 2021, an investigator input the following hashtags into the TikTok application's search bar: #AcneTreatment, #EczemaTreatment, #PsoriasisTreatment, and
