Department of Public Health, William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, United States.
Department of Mathematics, Lehman College, The City University of New York, Bronx, NY, United States.
JMIR Public Health Surveill. 2021 Feb 12;7(2):e26392. doi: 10.2196/26392.
Over the past decade, there has been an increasing secular trend in the number of studies on social media and health.
The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to examine the content and characteristics of TikTok videos that are related to an important aspect of community mitigation-the use of masks as a method for interrupting the transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
In total, 100 trending videos with the hashtag #WearAMask (ie, a campaign on TikTok), along with 32 videos that were posted by the World Health Organization (WHO) and involved masks in any way (ie, all related WHO videos at the time of this study), were included in our sample. We collected the metadata of each post, and created content categories based on fact sheets that were provided by the WHO and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We used these fact sheets to code the characteristics of mask use.
Videos that were posted on TikTok and had the hashtag #WearAMask garnered almost 500 million views, and videos that were posted by the WHO garnered almost 57 million views. Although the ratio of the number of trending #WearAMask videos to the number of WHO videos was around 3:1, the #WearAMask videos received almost 10 times as many cumulative views as the WHO videos. In total, 68% (68/100) of the trending #WearAMask videos involved humor and garnered over 355 million cumulative views. However, only 9% (3/32) of the WHO videos involved humor. Furthermore, 27% (27/100) of the trending #WearAMask videos involved dance and garnered over 130 million cumulative views, whereas none of the WHO videos involved dance.
This study is one of the first to describe how TikTok is being used to mitigate the community spread of COVID-19 by promoting mask use. Due to the platform's incredible reach, TikTok has great potential in conveying important public health messages to various segments of the population.
在过去十年中，社交媒体与健康相关的研究数量呈不断上升的趋势。
本横断面研究旨在检查与社区缓解措施的一个重要方面相关的 TikTok 视频的内容和特征——将口罩作为一种阻断 SARS-CoV-2 传播方法的使用。
本研究共纳入 100 个带有#戴口罩（即 TikTok 上的一项运动）标签的热门视频，以及 32 个以任何方式涉及口罩的世界卫生组织（WHO）发布的视频（即在本研究进行时所有相关的 WHO 视频）。我们收集了每个帖子的元数据，并根据 WHO 和美国疾病控制与预防中心提供的情况说明书创建了内容类别。我们使用这些情况说明书对口罩使用的特征进行编码。
带有#戴口罩标签的 TikTok 发布的视频获得了近 5 亿次观看，而 WHO 发布的视频获得了近 5700 万次观看。尽管带有#戴口罩标签的热门视频数量与 WHO 视频数量的比例约为 3:1，但#戴口罩标签的视频获得的总观看次数几乎是 WHO 视频的 10 倍。总的来说，68%（68/100）的热门#戴口罩标签视频涉及幽默，获得了超过 3.55 亿次的总观看次数。然而，只有 9%（3/32）的 WHO 视频涉及幽默。此外，27%（27/100）的热门#戴口罩标签视频涉及舞蹈，获得了超过 1.3 亿次的总观看次数，而 WHO 视频中没有舞蹈内容。
这项研究是首批描述 TikTok 如何通过推广口罩使用来减轻 COVID-19 社区传播的研究之一。由于该平台的巨大影响力，TikTok 具有向各个群体传达重要公共卫生信息的巨大潜力。
