Sunscreen videos are all over TikTok — but the ones that go the most viral are the ones that are packed with misinformation, a study published Thursday in the journal Plos Digital Health found.Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.Researchers from the University of Alberta in Canada analyzed TikTok videos with the highest views across the five most popular sunscreen-related hashtags.
Although the vast majority — 87% of the nearly 1,000 videos — promoted sunscreen use, the content with the highest levels of engagement were the ones that contained misinformation.That misinformation ranged from “sunburns aren’t dangerous” to claims that sunscreen is toxic, said lead study author Alessandro Marcon, a University of Alberta researcher who studies how health information spreads in the media.
“There were specific mentions that sunscreen has a hormone-disrupting potential, it was cancer-causing, contained carcinogens, it could taint your breast milk or contain microplastics,” Marcon said.Dr.
Anthony Rossi, a dermatologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, said, “I have to spend a good amount of time in my consultation to talk about what actually is the truth: how sunscreen does actually help and how using sunscreen is not going to cause skin cancer or lead you to be vitamin D deficient.”Rossi, who was not involved with the research, said sunscreen causing vitamin D deficiency is a narrative that has been rampant on social media.“There have been numerous studies that show even with regular daily use of sunscreen, you do not become vitamin D deficient,” he said.According to the new study, a lot of sunscreen misinformation focuses on so-called chemical sunscreens, which use chemical filters to absorb harmful ultraviolet rays.
(Mineral sunscreens, on the other hand, use mineral-based filters, either titanium dioxide or zinc oxide, to block the sun’s harmful rays.)...