Dissemination of Misinformation About COVID-19 on TikTok: A Multimodal Analysis

TikTok, a globally popular social media platform, that gained even more popularity amongst different age groups since the outbreak of COVID-19, has come under scrutiny in the recent past as the platform has significantly contributed to the dissemination of misinformation about COVID-19. Even though multiple works related to the analysis of misinformation about COVID-19 on social media have been published in the last few months, none of those works have focused on the analysis of misinformation by considering the user diversity and topics represented in TikTok videos. The work presented in this paper aims to address this research gap by presenting multiple novel findings from a comprehensive analysis of a dataset of TikTok videos containing different levels of misinformation (low, moderate, and high) about COVID-19. First, a diversity-based analysis showed that between male and female users of TikTok, males published a higher number of videos containing misinformation. Second, for videos containing low levels of misinformation, patients published a higher number of videos as compared to news sources or media outlets. Third, the analysis of the topics of these videos revealed multiple novel insights. For instance, for videos containing a moderate level of misinformation, the highest percentage of videos (18.889%) were videos that discussed the prevention of COVID-19. Finally, the average views, likes, and comments for videos with low levels of misinformation were found to be higher as compared to videos that contained moderate to high levels of misinformation.