February 2, 2023 – Add this to the list of potential health risks of social media: unwanted pregnancy.
This is true for girls who seek contraception advice from influencers, particularly on YouTube, where many speak about coming off hormonal contraception and will provide incomplete or inaccurate details about sexual health.
In an evaluation of fifty YouTube videos, researchers on the University of Delaware found that just about three-quarters of influencers talked about coming off contraception pills or other types of hormonal contraception. And 40% used or had used a way of “natural family planning” – where women track their cycles, sometimes using an app, to discover days when they could get pregnant.
“We know from previous studies that these non-hormonal options, such as fertility tracking apps, are not always as accurate as hormonal contraception,” says lead study creator Emily Pfender, who reported their results in the journal Health communication“They depend on so many different factors, such as body temperature and cervical mucus, which vary greatly.”
In fact, this “natural” approach only works when women closely follow guidelines equivalent to taking basal body temperature and monitoring cervical mucus every day. However, many influencers have left this part out. Using fertility monitoring methods without proper education and tools can increase the chance of an unwanted pregnancy, as failure rates with these methods vary from 2% to 23%in line with CDC.
Even more alarming: Of the influencers who stopped using hormonal contraception, only a 3rd mentioned replacing it with something else, says Pfender.
“The message that a few of these videos convey is that the attitude [hormonal birth control] is nice if you ought to improve your mental health and live more naturally, however it will not be essential to begin a special type of contraception,” she says. “This puts these women at increased risk of unwanted pregnancy and possibly sexually transmitted diseases.”
Rise of the health influencer
Taking health advice from influencers is nothing new and seems to be becoming increasingly popular.
“People have been sharing health information for many years, even before the Internet, but now it's far more widespread and easier,” says Dr. Erin Willis, an associate professor in the University of Colorado's College of Media, Communication, and Information who studies digital media and health communication.
Peer-to-peer health information is very powerful, says Willis. It makes people feel understood, especially when they have the same illness or share similar experiences or feelings. “The social support is there,” she says. “It's almost like crowdsourcing.”
For their study, Pfender and another researcher watched 50 YouTube videos posted between December 2019 and December 2021 by influencers with 20,000 to 2.2 million followers. The influencers cited the desire for more naturalness and improved mental health as the main reasons for stopping contraception.
Although hormonal contraceptives, namely the pill, have been used for decades and are considered safe, they have been associated with side effects such as depressionAnd people who share their experiences with hormonal contraceptives on the Internet can spark controversy about whether their use is safe.
But Pfender found that influencers did not always share accurate or complete information. For example, some influencers talked about using the cycle tracking app Daysy and touted it as extremely accurate. But none mentioned that the study supporting the app's effectiveness was retracted in 2019 due to flaws in the research methodology.
Not all health influencers give bad information, Willis says. Many have training in ethics and advocacy and are aware of their sensitive position and influence. Still, people have different levels of “health literacy” – some understand health information better than others, Willis points out. Analyzing the information and distinguishing the good from the bad is crucial.
Search for information that is not linked to a specific product, National Institute of Health recommends. And compare it with reliable websites, such as those ending in “.gov” or “.org”.