“Influencing the Influencers:” A Field Experimental Approach to Promoting Effective Mental Health Communication on TikTok

A substantial body of social scientific research considers the negative mental health consequences of social media use on TikTok. Fewer, however, have considered the potentially positive impact that mental health content creators (“influencers”) on TikTok can have to improve health outcomes; including the degree to which the platform exposes users to evidence-based mental health communication. We aim to remedy this shortcoming by influencing TikTok creator content-producing behavior via a large, within-subject field experiment (N = 105 creators with a reach of over 16 million TikTok followers; N = 3,465 unique videos). Our randomly-assigned field intervention exposed influencers on the platform to either (a) asynchronous digital (.pdf) toolkits, or (b) both toolkits and synchronous virtual training sessions that aimed to promote effective evidence-based mental health communication (relative to a control condition, exposed to neither intervention). We find that creators treated with our asynchronous toolkits – and, in some cases, those also attending synchronous training sessions – were significantly more likely to (i) feature evidence-based mental health content in their videos and (ii) generate video content related to mental health issues. Moderation analyses further reveal that these effects are not limited to only those creators with followings under 2 million users. Importantly, we also document large system-level effects of exposure to our interventions; such that TikTok videos featuring evidence-based content received over half a million additional views in the post-intervention period in the study’s treatment groups, while mental health content (in general) received over two million additional views. We conclude by discussing how simple and cost-effective interventions like ours can be deployed at scale to influence mental health content production on TikTok.