The Internet is both excellent and terrifying in spreading information and community. In a sense, it can provide access to many people and perspectives that are not available in human daily life. At the same time, it may mature with wrong information, and those who cause more harm than good may be mature.
Now, one from guardian The way these two things are being revealed. According to a mental health professional, a survey found that 52 of the first 100 videos tagged #MentalHealthTips contained at least some misinformation. These clips discuss conditions and experiences such as anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, trauma, neurological disorders.
“Tiktok’s proposal of having secret universal cues and truths to spread false information may actually make the audience feel worse, such as failure, when these techniques are more than just healing,” said Amber Johnston, a psychologist at the British Psychosocial Credit. guardian.
Experts identified four main topics in misleading and inaccurate information. The first is pathological emotions, which are in videos describing daily feelings, such as fatigue or surrounding anxiety, which are clear indicators of a particular mental illness. They seem to mean experiencing any symptoms of a mental health disorder means the audience must live with it.
Then, whether it is by inaccurately describing mental health disorders or using words like abuse, certain actions can be explained without context or nuance, abuse of therapeutic language. The third category is reportedly the most common: unproven treatment and false claims. These clips include some way to heal the trauma in just one hour, ingesting something can cause depression, and the supplements made to relieve anxiety.
The last topic identified is anecdotal evidence. Videos in this field include recommendations for hospitalization based solely on the creator’s own experience. Another person in the hospital gown showed that he implied himself in the psychiatry department because they were too honest with the therapist.
Misinformation is a huge problem on the entire social media platform, and many companies have nothing to do with it. Take Meta, which deleted its fact-checking program in the United States in April this year. Instead, it chose community notes, which allow crowdsourcing responses to positions.
Tiktok has made several claims over the years that it eliminates “problematic” content and inaccurate videos. In a statement shared with it guardianA Tiktok spokesperson praised the app as a place where people can share and support their mental health experiences. “The research approach has obvious limitations, which opposes this free expression and implies that people should not be allowed to share their own stories.”
The spokesman added that Tiktok worked with the World Health Organization and the NHS in the UK to provide accurate information and claimed that the app has removed 98% of the “harmful misinformation before being reported to us”.
