Science Literacy Gone Viral

The goal of my medical writing class at the University of Delaware is to teach STEM students how to translate nerd jargon to the general public. But more and more, I find myself guiding them through the reverse process: learning how to read popular medical stories with a critical eye, seeking out credible research that would confirm or deny the validity of what they read.

My students have varied backgrounds in science, from wildlife biology and neuroscience to physical therapy and engineering. They are incredibly smart in many ways, but they can be deeply naive when it comes to the things they read and watch online. One day we were talking about medical and health trends that my students saw on social media. They mentioned liver cleanses and foot detoxes, along with skincare routines that had more steps than a lighthouse. I asked how many of them checked to see if there was any scientific research to back up those claims. Not many hands went up. 

My classroom experience reflects a much broader problem. In collaboration with colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Medical Communication Research Institute, I surveyed 189 college students from across the country about where they get their medical and mental health information. For mental health, the internet was the main source. For medical concerns, surprisingly, their parents were number one, with the internet a strong runner-up.  

Our study found that Instagram was the top social media source for medical information (mentioned by 85 percent of students), but TikTok (64 percent) was close behind. TikTok, which launched in 2016, has seen its influence rise dramatically over the past few years, buoyed by the Covid pandemic and by the 2017 shutdown of Vine, an American-based video platform that allowed users to share looping, 6-second videos.

TikTok currently has more than 1.8 billion users globally, its reach further enhanced by the fact that many of its videos get reposted on Instagram, Facebook, and even YouTube and X.  

TikTok originally limited users to 15 seconds, then increased the maximum length to 60 seconds in 2017, to three minutes in 2021, and to 10 minutes this year, although most still post videos less than a minute long, according to Statista. The longer the videos, the more time people spent on the platform. One 2024 study from Pew Research Center surveyed teenagers aged 13 to 17, and found that 57 percent said they use the platform daily, while 16 percent said they were on it “almost constantly.” 

The reach of TikTok and other short-form videos online makes them highly effective for spreading ideas about medicine and psychology. This efficiency can sometimes be problematic. For instance, TikTok videos have spread dangerous stereotypes about ADHD. One recent study found that less than half the ADHD-related content on TikTok correctly described the condition, leading to incorrect stereotypes and potentially problematic self-diagnosis. A 2024 study out of the University of Chicago examined videos about sinusitis and determined that less than half (46.7 percent) of the ones posted by “nonmedical influencers” qualified as factual.  

Now academics are starting to address this challenge in the classroom, often using the very same tools that created the problem. After all, if TikTok and other social media can spread the wrong message, they can spread the correct information as well.

Using TikTok as a learning tool, teachers are challenging students to break down the information, including the abundant medical and mental health information, that’s presented to them online. Teachers encourage students to find the sources (if any) cited by influencers. Students then create their own video explainers to share accurate information about history and science. 

Teachers say that incorporating TikTok into their lesson plans has made their students more engaged and has helped them view social media through a skeptical lens. Increasingly, educators are also making videos of their own, sharing their knowledge in short clips created for their classrooms but also aimed at introducing new knowledge to the general public.

In my case, I asked my students to find a medical or health myth or trend—on TikTok or other social media—and then see if it could be supported by peer-reviewed research. Sample topics in included “Do you need a liver detox?” (no) and “Can I get pink eye from someone farting on my pillow?” (also no, and thank you to the movie Knocked Up for encouraging that myth). My aim was to get the students thinking, and to show them how easy it was to support or debunk something they saw online, using the same online tools that got them on the path to start with. 

Ernest Crim III, a U.S. history teacher in Joliet, Illinois, tells teachers who are experimenting with TikTok to set their expectations low: no need for fancy ring lights or microphones, just use a basic phone and keep it simple. He prefers recording in his car, parked in a quiet area. The light is good, the mood is informal, the car provides an echo chamber, and the camera stays still. 

Crim’s first TikTok was on the Black investigative journalist and civil rights leader Ida B. Wells. He then became known for sharing Black history lessons on TikTok, sometimes taken from his curriculum, sometimes just offering a quick fact to share. Now he has more than 420,000 followers on TikTok and another 410,000 on Instagram. He brought TikTok into his classroom, too, assigning students to record their own political ads or to create a commercial for a company that would have existed in the Gilded Age. 

“I always tell educators to let the kids take the lead. If you have a topic that you think would be pretty cool, let the kids exercise their creativity. That’s one of the best ways to increase engagement,” he says. 

Crim also links his lessons with current events. For example, he posted a TikTok after the 2025 shooting at Florida State University, highlighting that the main threat of domestic terrorism comes from white supremacists, not from immigrants. “Let’s see what people are talking about. Then let’s compare what they say to a reputable news site, and let’s see if there’s any correlation,” he says.

Since 2012, Jeff Carpenter, a professor of education at Elon University in North Carolina, has studied the changing ways that teachers use social media in the classroom. At first, he reports, it was mainly “Teacher Twitter,” in which educators connected on social media to share tips and experiences with each other. Carpenter started focusing on TikTok in 2021, when many of his undergrads were turning to the platform.

In a 2024 study, “How and why educators use TikTok: Come for the fun, stay for the learning?” Carpenter and his colleagues interviewed more than 400 teachers from Northern Arizona University and the University of Redlands in California. The researchers found that many teachers began using TikTok during the pandemic, when classes were virtual, but pulled back after the return to the classroom. Today, teachers use the app more for viewing, as an educational tool, than for creating, such as assigning students to make original content. 

“Producing the content is trickier: You need a course to get the production values higher,” Carpenter says. 

One of the biggest issues Carpenter uncovered is that even many educators who use TikTok don’t fully understand how it works. About 25 percent of the teachers interviewed for the study didn’t  know how TikTok makes money (primarily through advertising and in-app purchases). More than half were also unsure of their school’s social media policies. Carpenter believes many teachers are eager to integrate digital literacy into their curriculum, but this requires district-level support—and not all of them provide it.   

Nick Schreck, dean of the business school at Midland University in Fremont, Nebraska, uses TikTok not just to teach his students, but also to understand them better. Like three-fourths of the app’s users, he is a lurker, not a poster. He finds it instructive to observe firsthand how his students consume information and to see what they are interested in consuming. He notes that his students often struggle to distinguish fact from fiction and advertising from reality on TikTok, reinforcing a lesson of the ADHD study, which found that many content creators included links to purchase supplements and other products. 

In an article for Stukent, a teacher content site, Schreck describes an assignment in which he required students to identify promoted content in their TikTok feed. He expected students to ask how advertisers were able to target them. “Instead, I got questions about how to tell whether something was an ad or sponsored content,” he writes. “Students had a surprisingly hard time identifying what an ad or sponsored content looked like relative to other things in their feed.” 

Some scientist-teachers began using social media videos early on, to address misinformation and to set the record straight. Raven Baxter, aka “Raven the Science Maven,” starting posting science education videos in 2017 while working on her doctorate in molecular biology. Her 2020 video “The Antibody Song” was inspired by a student who needed help on a microbiology exam. The song went viral on YouTube, along with “Wipe Me Down,” which clarified ways to keep safe early in the Covid pandemic. Baxter has nearly 60,000 followers on TikTok as well.

In a 2021 interview with The Washington Post, Baxter (now director of science communication at the Ichan School of Medicine at Mount Sinai) noted that a lack of basic science literacy had led to a distrust of scientists on the crucial topics of masking and vaccines. “I do not feel that the current and past states of our school systems have been focused enough on science literacy,” she said. “We must learn from what is happening today regarding trust in science to move forward and build the country’s science literacy through education.” To that end, Baxter now offers a six-month science communication program aimed at scientists.

There’s no question that TikTok, and social media in general, are not to blame for the current flood of science and health misinformation. The problem long predates online culture, and even in its current form it has many enablers: political motivations, click-driven algorithms, perverse financial incentives, and casual posters who are too lazy or unaware that they need to check if the information they put on those platforms is true. AI may exacerbate the situation by making it easier to generate misleading posts and by encouraging students to outsource their critical thinking to the mindless analysis of ChatGPT.

TikTok and online videos in general at least offer a powerful tool for fighting back against misinformation—not just in health and medicine, but across the board.

Emily Glankler, a high school history teacher in Austin, Texas, mixes history lessons with pop culture and has gathered more than 500,000 TikTok followers. She notes that users on TikTok constantly get new information via a “For You” page of recommendations. Although the For You page can amplify misinformation (if a viewer watches an entire video about how the Earth is flat, more similar videos will pop up on their screen), it has a major upside. Glankler says that her followers are constantly engaging with fresh information, and her videos land with new audiences all the time.

Last year, Glankler was teaching about 1960s world history in her class when Russia invaded Ukraine. She came across an online video of a protest song: a person playing a guitar, singing lyrics that claimed to be the transcript of text messages from a Russian soldier in Ukraine sent back home to his mother. Glankler realized that this modern example of a ‘60s folk song could become the foundation of a critical thinking lesson for her students, one that could be applied for any subject. 

“I said, ‘Let's all take five minutes, and let's kind of research this. How do we know that these texts are real? Who is this person who's making this music?’” She and her students discovered together that the texts were real and had been read on the floor of the United Nations. That five-minute addition to her lesson on the 1960s provided a quick, powerful way to show students that they were experiencing history as it happened. It also reminded them to make sure that what they were being told was real was, in fact, authentic.

Crim, who has taken time off from academia to promote his book How Black History Can Save Your Life, tries to use his TikTok platform to focus on under-reported stories in addition to misleading ones. He posted a video about a local Black high-school girl who was roughed up at a bar. The story was well-known to his community, but not to a larger audience at the time. It was his first TikTok to get more than a million views. 

Another time, one of Crim’s students called his attention to an online video claiming that Martin Luther King, Jr., fought for civil rights only because he wanted to date a white woman. Crim shared it with the class and asked them to apply the critical thinking skills they had learned. They worked together to fact-check the video, which turned out to be riddled with falsehoods and hearsay.  

Fighting such misinformation is particularly important now, in an era when Black history is being erased by executive order. Crim encourages his followers and students to fact-check his own work just as rigorously. “I always try to say that I’m not a TikTok creator, I’m an educator who uses it,” he says. 

It may seem unfair to place yet another burden on the educational system, asking teachers to add TikTok skills to their long list of duties. Ideally, I would say that lessons about critical thinking and misinformation should begin at home. As my study showed, parents are the ones kids turn to first for medical information. But let’s be real: Parents are just as attached to screens as kids are, and they, too, are susceptible to the onslaught of misinformation. How do you teach the public whom to trust when the people at the top levels of power are shutting down scientific research and questioning well-founded knowledge about vaccines? 

As educators, we only have so many battles we can fight, and only so many platforms we can fight them on. The best we can do is plant the seeds of skepticism, teach students to ask strong questions and find good sources, and hope they take that extra moment before scrolling on.