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BackgroundHealth misinformation is abundant online and becoming an increasingly pressing concern for both oncology practitioners and patients with cancer. On social media platforms, including the popular audiovisual app TikTok, the flourishing alternative health industry is further contributing to the spread of misleading and often harmful information, endangering patients’ health and outcomes and sowing distrust of the medical community. The prevalence of false and potentially dangerous treatments on a platform that is used as a quasi–search engine by young people poses a serious risk to the health of patients with cancer. ObjectiveThis study seeks to examine how cancer discourse on TikTok differs between alternative health and conventional medicine videos. It aims to look beyond mere facts and falsehoods that TikTok users may utter to understand the visual language and format used in the support of both misleading and truthful narratives, as well as other messages. MethodsUsing computer vision analysis and subsequent qualitative close reading of 831 TikTok videos, this study examined how alternative health and conventional medicine videos on cancer differ with regard to the visual language used. Videos were examined for the length of time and prominence in which faces are displayed, as well as for the background setting, location, and dominant color scheme. ResultsThe results show that the alt-health and conventional health samples made different use of the audiovisual affordances of TikTok. First, videos from the alternative health sample were more likely to contain a single face that was prominently featured (making up at least 7.5% of the image) for a substantial period of time (35% of the shots), with these testimonial-style videos making up 28.5% (93/326) of the sample compared to 18.6% (94/505) of the conventional medicine sample. Alternative health videos predominantly featured cool tones (P |
