‘Influencing the influencers’: Exploring the impact of an in-person summit on TikTokers’ mental health communication habits and beliefs

Social media platforms such as TikTok hold tremendous promise for reaching large proportions of the general population with health messaging. However, the proliferation of health misinformation on these platforms poses a significant public health risk. Partnerships between public health experts and social media content creators are a novel intervention which may overcome concerns about misinformation and catalyze the proliferation of evidence-based health messages on social media. To build such partnerships between creators and mental health and health communication experts, The Center for Health Communication (CHC) at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health held an in-person summit that attracted mental health creators working on TikTok and other social media platforms. Over the course of two days, creators were exposed to techniques for communicating evidence-based research and recommendations that promote mental health. Following the summit, creators who attended the summit were re-contacted for in-depth interviews to assess the summit's impact on their beliefs and behaviors. Results reveal that attending the summit changed creators’ content-making behaviors, increased their sense of responsibility and awareness of their power to impact mental health outcomes among social media users, validated their work and motivation as health communicators, and created a much-needed community of support among peers. Given that social media is a primary source of health information for many people, our findings provide a blueprint for public health communicators hoping to build lasting strategic relationships with today’s most influential media gatekeepers.