A disturbing number of TikTok videos about autism include claims that are “patently false,” study finds::A recent study published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders found that a significant majority (73%) of informational videos on TikTok tagged with “#Autism” contain inaccurate or overgeneralized information about autism. Despite the prevalence of misinformation, these videos have amassed billions of views, highlighting the potential for widespread misconceptions about autism on the platform. …
It disturbs me that people would consider TikTok an accurate source of…anything.
The bar is so low. I remember my old roommates from Uni. If there was any disagreement about a thing, they’d whip out their phone, find any article that remotely supports their claim and that was it. You’re wrong. A case in point was using reg dishwashing soap in a dishwasher (I told them all not to). They couldn’t really find anything on Google so they just said it was fine.
The future looks as bright as mud.
Fact checking. Never heard of it.
I had someone yesterday claim I was wrong about a pretty complicated scientific thing but they were vague and didn’t say why I was wrong.
I have a background in that topic, so it only took a second to find a scientific study to back me up…
They immediately replied with an article that had nothing to do with what anyone was talking about, and when I told them that, they refused to explain what was relevant, called me rude, and blocked me.
Their mind was made up, and they just picked the first result off whatever they googled and assumed it backed them up.
Idiots “doing their own research” rarely works out well, they’re not trying to learn anything, just win an argument they don’t understand
By the way, I’ve seen Google displaying halucinated AI written articles as the main, highlited result.
Yep, ask Google something like “water causes covid” and you’ll likely get some idiot saying water causing COVID because that matches your search.
This is perpetuated by some shitty internet personalities too.
“You will NEVER believe it, this study peer reviewed paper TOTALY DEBUNKS !!!”
(links to a paper that indicates the exact opposite of that)
Sounds about right Glares in existential horror at flat earthers
just win an argument
That’s the problem.
We humans have goals, as in “satisfaction from winning”, or as in “solace from reaching some idea the correct way so it’d likely be true”.
Theirs is not to be correct, it’s to defeat you, to win, to dominate etc.
A conversation where your counterpart see themselves as your opponent just should end once you see that. Also it would be fair to inform them that this is ape behavior, but sometimes unwise sadly.
Also the approach that an argument as in “opposition to each other” leads to truth is more or less the same thing as dialectics. And dialectics do not have any scientific value (we are not pursuing studies of “scientific communism” here).
using reg dishwashing soap in a dishwasher
At least that’s a mistake they’ll (probably) only make once.
I admire your optimism.
Sorry, what’s the problem with dishwasher soap? Isn’t it meant to be specifically used in a dishwasher? Or does “regular dishwashing soap” refer to detergent? Sorry, I am just confused.
There’s soap for hand wash, “dish soap”.
Then there’s “dishwashing detergent” that goes in dishwashers.
“Dish soap” is made to make bubbles when hand washing, but it in a machine and you’ll have a foam party
Reminds me of the time that I desperately needed to make a latte but discovered I was out of milk. Rather than doing the smart thing and giving up I searched online to find out if sour cream can somehow be used as a substitute.
Turns out you can’t trust a single article in a sea of emptiness
It’s the way search engines work.
Phrase a question wrong, and you’ll get shitty results that agree.
Like Google “what causes an upset stomach” would probably give good results. Google “water causes upset stomach” because you think water causes it, and you’ll get results about water causing an upset stomach. Even if that’s not the cause in your situation
As I understand it, one could use butter as a creamer substitute, but I don’t drink coffee, and I doubt that you could make a latte with it, just based on my culinary experience.
A case in point was using reg dishwashing soap in a dishwasher (I told them all not to). They couldn’t really find anything on Google so they just said it was fine.
The good thing about that particular misapprehension is that it is very quickly self correcting.
LOL - sink dish soap in the dishwasher!
I have made that error once… Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do!
I don’t need the "splainin’, but I ain’t cleaning that up, especially if I already warned you what would happen
It’s Sturgeon’s Law.
I feel Sturgeon’s pain. Was just in an old book shop that had every genre imaginable including even cookbooks and weird old junk books about the paranormal and casting spells, trashy romance stuff, old historical records, all sorts of random crap. I asked if there were any science fiction or fantasy books. Owner of store: no we don’t stock that stuff, we only stock things of literary value.
Alright buddy, geeze. Yeah no sicence fiction or fantasy of any literary value was ever written I guess.
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With YouTube there are people who put a lot of effort and research into videos, and they have the time to dive deeps and address nuances related to an issue.
With the short format of TikTok there is no time for nuance and it’s all about grabbing someone’s attention in the first second and trying to hold it for 20-60 seconds.
They’re very different platforms.
That isn’t to say YouTube doesn’t have bad information on it, but at least the format of the platform doesn’t limit the ability to provide good information on complex topics.
Find me a better source of information on defense economics than Perun. He is considered the pinnacle unless you want to wade through multi-hundred long pages of heavily redacted DoD reports yourself.
The fact is, long-form YouTube content has the ability to be incredibly informative in a way that purely short-form TikToks cannot.
Great to know! Now do ADHD.
I’m getting kinda tired of being flooded with ADHD memes that are just like, “I sometimes get distracted” or, “I don’t like doing chores”.
And the amount of “omg I stimmed in this public place!” That are then videos of them just being dicks and pretending that this “uncontrollable movement” knocked something over.
And the amount of patently fake DID tiktoks, ugh. I moved over to YouTube shorts mostly for other reasons but there are way less of those things going on there.
I knock over shit with uncontrolled movement all the time, but I’m not gonna pretend that it’s either stimming or uncontrollable. It’s just the usual “brain lost track of one sub-process of movement again” that happens with ADHD.
My stimming is usually bouncing my leg, tapping a rhythm on something or unconsciously mouthing the lyrics of some song. I’m aware particularly the latter may be disconcerting to some people, but it’s a far cry from being a dick.
It really detracts from how debilitating ADHD can be for someone. I didn’t get diagnosed until a year after college and started medication soon after. My god it was like night and day. Like I could finally plan tasks and structure my day instead of shutting down at something as simple as moving clothes to the dryer when there’s another thing to do in the same hour.
. I didn’t get diagnosed until a year after college and started medication soon after. My god it was like night and day
I always joke that diagnosis would be much easier if everyone was just given a bit of adderall and see how they respond. Bouncing off the walls? Normie. Finally finishes their taxes? ADHD.
Kids should be allowed to micro-dose amphetamines. As a treat.
Honestly worst part about not getting diagnosed until after college was hitting a Juul for the first time during a hookup and being like “oh shit this made my brain quiet” and developed a nicotine addiction. Senior year was my toughest class load yet my best GPA even with a medical emergency in the spring. Imagine if I started meds earlier. My ass would have understood stats and R and been unstoppable, but I had the bandwidth to teach them to myself afterwards. Now I do analytics for a living. Thanks drugs!
I hear stories like this and I’m still searching for the one that will do this for me. I think I’m on #4 now. Fingers crossed!
Adderall makes nearly everyone work-motivated. That’s why college students abuse it when studying/writing, and why the old don’t-do-meth commercials used to describe people cleaning their spotless houses.
This is exactly it. I get so tired of hearing people say shit like “I forgot. I’m so adhd.” or “Everyone’s a little adhd.” No, you’re/they’re not and you apparently don’t even know what it is or you wouldn’t say things like that.
What kind of medication did they prescribe you?
Vyvanse for ADHD and Cymbalta for depression/panic disorder.
Thank you
I understand that it can be annoying, but I personally find the adhd memes pretty funny and relatable because my fiancee has adhd. A lot of the memes about not doing chores and getting distracted can be applicable to neurotypical people, but there’s also an additional layer of lived experience that accompanies those memes to be very relevant to people that have adhd or lives with someone who does
I’m really torn on this, because on one hand the over generalization of ADHD prevented me - and is still preventing me - from taking my own diagnosis too seriously, but that same information got me to at least think about it and get a consult with a psychiatrist on it in the first place.
It helped the diagnosis but not the feelings of being an imposter post-diagnosis.
I see shit like that on lemmy as well.
Everyone wants to be a victim nowadays
Today I learned some people actually think tiktok is the place for accurate medical information
Journalistic standards are remarkably low on TikTok. One might go so far as to say that they are entirely absent.
It’s almost as if the platform is explicitly meant to provide the video equivalent of Twitter’s 144 character meaningless messages.
tiktok allows videos up to 10 minutes
Sure, and yet virtually no one doomscrolls 10 minute videos. And even the “longer” videos in the scroll - meaning 15+ seconds, which nobody watches to finish anyways - have virtually no content, being just someone making stupid motions or reading out a text message.
That is, TikTok is as if an AI got tasked to turn meaningless tweets into portrait format videos. It’s a facsimile of video content. As if the creator only knew about what videos are based on the wikipedia entry for it or something.
The mental health misinformation (or more charitably, widespread misunderstanding) on TikTok is fucking wild. Especially in regard to ADHD, autism, and couples therapy
You’re telling me all those self diagnosed individuals are spreading misinformation? How shocking…
This is probably what you can expect when the subject matter is as fraught as anything-mental-health can be, and when what passes for clinical experts willing and able to share information on it are so rare as to be unicorns, plus many of them are working from outdated DSM criteria anyhow.
I was clinically diagnosed during the pandemic, then turned unpacking my own experience of autism into a new special interest (lol of course I would do that). I specifically follow quite a few accounts on tiktok belonging to health care practitioners and researchers, and I regard what they have to say in that light, while I also follow lots of ‘hey-I-self-diagnosed-now-let’s-talk-about-it’ accounts and consider what they have to say in that light.
I’m left with the impression that the researchers and practitioners are in an exciting, evolving field in which the subject matter is less-well-known than we might all like, and that the lay autistic folk sharing their experiences are doing it because frankly, the experts weren’t filling that need and what do high-masking/hyperverbal autistic folk do when we know a thing or two? We infodump, that’s what we do. (like this. you’re reading it now. sorry, not-sorry)
Are we always right? Heavens, no.
But, is the bar low to begin with? Oh, yes. Yes, it is. For example, while these tiktokers are sharing what they think (maybe it’s wrong, or DSM-inaccurate, etc.) there are also charlatans out there waving autism around like it’s a boogeyman your children get if they receive vaccinations, when there’s no evidence to support claims like that.
What are you gonna tell me next, that 4chan isn’t the best place to go for relationship advice?
Still better relationship advice than Tiktok
“In a surprise finding, experts conclude TikTok is not a reliable source for factual information.”
Inaccuracy was measured against the Autism diagnosis in the DSM and standard approved treatments. These are always going to be out of date because you’re not allowed to run tests on humans. Something about ethics. So the DSM and psych industry are always playing catch-up. Meanwhile, you have a large group of people with lived experience sharing that experience. Surely that counts for something?
“Videos produced by health care practitioners were more likely to be *accurate * [emphasis mine] compared to those by autistic creators and ‘other’ creators”
Yes, of course the actual autistic people would know less about how to address their daily issues than doctors /s
Still, anyone who created a tiktok on how to ‘cure’ autism can get fucked. That part I can agree with.
Yes, of course the actual autistic people would know less about how to address their daily issues than doctors /s
They would be familiar with their own personal experience, yes. But things like autism vary greatly. Doctors will understand the condition more generally.
Meanwhile, you have a large group of people with lived experience sharing that experience. Surely that counts for something?
Not necessarily.
My kid has been diagnosed with autism and ADHD, and going through the diagnosis process, we realised that I fit a lot of the symptoms. Speaking to friends with various disorders and mental health issues, as well as reading up on them online, we found out that autism and ADHD have overlaps in behaviour. They also overlap with anxiety, OCD, bipolar disorder, and a few others.
The bouncing knee seems to be recognised as a stim for autism, hyperactivity for ADHD, and a nervous behaviour for anxiety. A group of people could convince someone that it’s a sign of whichever diagnosis they personally have, while not knowing about the others, all while not realising that the person asking is just suffering from caffeine withdrawal.
Obviously this is an oversimplification, but hopefully it helps to point out that all groups have their own blind spots, and we all tend to colour things with our own perspective.
Best bet is to seek a diagnosis from a qualified professional.
I am a layperson so wtf do I know but my layperson impression: DSM is the source obviously but there is a big gap between the words in the DSM and the details of how symptoms actually manifest for, in my case, ADHD. Also it is a diagnosis manual but the etiology of ADHD hasn’t been settled so there’s not like a brain scan or DNA analysis to test for it.
BREAKING NEWS: PEOPLE SAID WRONG THINGS ON THE INTERNET!
TikTok has some nice stuff but also people making stuff up for attention and clout.
Tiktok is still probably a better source of information than most British doctors. Official diagnosis by an expert is obviously the gold standard but I would imagine self diagnosis remains the starting point for the majority of people.
That is a completely ridiculous statement.
On the other hand, most people who ended up getting a diagnosis for some form of neurodivergence had suspicions themselves before specifically asking to get tested. In my experience, medical professionals really are not looking out for stuff as much as they should.
I myself ended up getting a diagnosis as an adult after my own insistence at getting tested, despite how obvious it was my whole life.
