TikTok users are falling prey to the marketing strategies of firms and are turning into “unofficial brand ambassadors” of unhealthy food and beverages, a recent study has found. This might have problematic health impacts on the numerous young children who use the platform.

Advertisements for unhealthy food and non-alcoholic beverages are in every single place they usually’re now not limited to television and billboards. With digital marketing, even children might be exposed to such advertisements once they use their gadgets, and research has shown that this could impact their food preferences and eating patterns.

For his or her study, published in BMJ Global Health, the researchers checked out how unhealthy food and non-alcoholic beverages were marketed on TikTok, which is one of the crucial popular social media platforms on the earth. The truth is, its global monthly lively users rose from 55 million in 2018 to a billion by last September, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) noted in a news release. Within the U.S., greater than a 3rd of its users are aged 14 and even younger.

“No study so far has examined unhealthy food and non-alcoholic beverage marketing on TikTok, despite calls for urgent attention to be paid to the health implications of the platform,” the researchers wrote.

The researchers checked out 539 videos posted by various brands: 60% of them were posted within the first half of 2021, while the earliest videos (3%) were from 2019 and the remainder (37%) were from 2020.

Essentially the most common methods that firms employed to market their products were branding, product images, engaging users through branded hashtag challenges and the usage of influencers or celebrities. In these “engagement” challenges, users are sometimes encouraged to create videos featuring the brands’ products or to make use of stickers or effects that feature the brand, they usually can generate numerous responses.

“The full collective views of user-generated content from single challenges ranged from 12.7 million to 107.9 billion,” the researchers wrote.

While 3% of the user-generated videos portrayed negative content, similar to criticisms of the product’s taste or nutrition content, a whopping 73% actually had positive sentiments. The remaining 25% were neutral.

Moreover, regardless that there have been fewer videos from users who “appear to have been paid,” they’d 10 times more likes per video than others. It’s possible that such videos help promote the branded hashtag challenges, the researchers said.

“(B)randed hashtag challenges are effectively turning users into, in TikTok’s words, ‘unofficial brand ambassadors,'” they wrote, noting that TikTok has quite a couple of features that encourage imitation and replication amongst users. “Our findings show brands capitalize on this by including branded effects and brand products in branded hashtag challenges, with branding and product images then propagated via user-generated content created in response.” 

The researchers noted some limitations of their study, including the undeniable fact that it cannot establish “causality” because of its observational nature. Nonetheless, the findings prompt concern in regards to the amount of exposure to unhealthy food and non-alcoholic beverages. It also highlights the necessity for policies that may protect children from potentially negative health impacts.

“Our study has shown that TikTok is an emerging source of unhealthy food marketing, including that created by users on the instigation of brands,” the researchers concluded. “Given TikTok’s popularity amongst children, our findings support the necessity for policies that protect children from the harmful impact of food marketing, including that on social networking platforms.”