If you've been on TikTok or Instagram lately, you've probably scrolled past at least one glossy video promoting a weight-loss supplement powder or pill, promising to banish bloat, make you look "snatched," and deliver "nature's Ozempic." These ads are part of a $33 billion-plus industry built on pseudoscience, and they're flooding the feeds of millions, particularly women, young girls, and people of color.
At the Boston University School of Public Health, we took an unconventional approach to combat weight-loss supplement misinformation -- not by designing public service announcements or campaigns, but by partnering with the very creators who shape the online infoscape. The idea was simple: If public health wants to compete with misinformation, it must engage social media strategically and partner with those shaping the conversation.
The need for this shift is real. The public has declining trust in science and public health institutions. On issues from vaccines to climate change to food production and policy, public opinion is increasingly polarized. In this environment, health misinformation travels faster than official guidance, especially on social media.
While these platforms have amplified health myths, they also offer opportunity. Dismissing social media as uniformly untrustworthy oversimplifies the landscape and overlooks the power and existence of credible, engaging messengers who can help inform, influence, and shift public understanding with evidence-based content.
We are testing this strategy in one of today's most pervasive health misinformation arenas: diet and weight-loss supplements. In collaboration with the Center for Health Communication at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, we recruited seven diverse content creators with a combined following of nearly 2 million users across TikTok and Instagram and provided them with straightforward, evidence-based materials on weight-loss supplements. Each creator had full creative freedom in how they incorporated the content (using as much or as little from the toolkit as they chose) to produce original videos tailored to their audiences.
Even with a small pilot, the content shifted meaningfully to include more accurate and underreported facts. For example, before receiving the toolkit, less than 1 percent of creators' videos mentioned that weight-loss supplements do not require FDA pre-market approval. After the training, nearly 90 percent of videos they produced as part of our training included this information. Mentions of potential harms of consuming weight-loss supplements, like liver damage, also increased.
These results, while promising, are based on a small-scale study that we hope can serve as a foundation for future research. But we've seen this approach succeed at scale before. In an earlier study published in Scientific Reports, researchers partnered with more than 100 TikTok mental-health influencers, providing them with a simple digital toolkit and, for some, in-person training at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Creators who received these resources were significantly more likely to feature evidence-based messages. Those small shifts translated into nearly one million additional views of credible content, far more than an academic article could hope to reach.
The lesson from both studies is clear: If public health wants to compete with misinformation, it must stop treating social media as the enemy and start partnering with it as an ally. Too often, scientists rely on traditional, top-down communication models such as peer-reviewed papers, government reports, and health agency PSAs. These methods matter, but they're no match for viral content that spreads in seconds. Most people aren't reading the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report or scanning the latest research from The American Journal of Public Health on their lunch break -- they're scrolling.
Public health institutions can't and shouldn't expect most scientists to become influencers. But we also can't cling to outdated communication models designed for academic peers, not the public. Science is meant to serve people, yet it's often locked behind paywalls or shared in conference halls far removed from where most health decisions are made. What we can do is partner with those who already know how to reach large, diverse audiences and equip them with content that's credible, clear, and engaging. Social media is a source of both misinformation and accurate information. In the right hands, it can be a powerful channel to improve health communication and shift perspectives, behaviors, and health at scale.
Misinformation isn't going away anytime soon. Neither is social media. If public health fails to adapt, the falsehoods will continue to outpace the facts. If we reimagine how we communicate and who delivers the message, we just might have a chance to close the gap.