Students Viewed This Type Of TikTok 412 Billion Times—And It’s Not Porn

W hen Joshua Martin teaches an algebra, calculus or physics lesson on TikTok, tens of thousands of viewers drift in and out of the livestream and 1,000 or more stick with him through the entire hour—a headcount that would fill a large university lecture hall several times over. But students who miss his live streams—or want to review a key point—must head over to Martin’s YouTube channel , Ludus, where they’ll find similarly detailed explainers on demand. That’s by design.

TikTok is notoriously chintzy with creators. Last month Martin, a 23-year-old graduate student in physics at Stony Brook University in New York (who spent a year as a high school physics teacher), received $0. 79 cents from TikTok’s creator fund for the 115,000 views on his videos.

But he picks up $500 per month in ad revenue on YouTube. The amount of science misinformation on TikTok—and the views that dreck attracts—further frustrates Martin. So why stick it out? Because that’s where his prospective students are in large numbers.

Martin posted his first TikTok in 2019, and now has 600,000 followers. In the first video, he taught a quick trick for multiplying numbers by nine. In another, he urged students to visit his YouTube channel for physics and math help.

“That video got 4 million views, and I went from 1,500 subscribers on YouTube … to 40,000 in one night,” Martin marvels. (He now has 85,000 on YouTube. ) As TikTok has quickly expanded beyond its entertainment niche, the appetite for academic help on the video-sharing platform has grown, along with both quality content and scientific trash.

The #studytok tag has amassed 6 billion views. The tag #LearnOnTikTok is one of the most popular hashtags on the app, and videos with it have been viewed more than 412 billion times, according to analytics company Pentos. Since Pentos began tracking #LearnOnTikTok in July, the number of videos with the hashtag has increased 15%—faster growth than the #dance, #meme, #comedy, #makeup and #storytime tags have seen in the same time period.

According to a recent survey from textbook company McGraw Hill, three in four college students now look to social media, primarily TikTok and YouTube, for study help. In fact, the 134-year-old education publisher is scrambling to keep up with the trend. Earlier this month it released an app called Sharpen that walks students through textbook material using bite-sized, entertaining videos that play in rapid succession, interspersed with short quizzes that are rewarded with Duolingo-like congratulatory screens.

“Around eight minutes they get a celebration screen, and then they get a five-to-eight-minute gamified quiz, which reinforces everything they’ve just learned,” says Justin Singh, chief transformation officer at McGraw Hill. “And just like TikTok or Instagram Reels, if they’re in the zone, they can just keep going. ” Singh reports that one student said Sharpen looks like “their textbook and TikTok had a baby.

” He’s hoping students will choose that amalgam over social media since the material is accurate and aligned with their classes. The app does not reference specific pages in McGraw Hill textbooks and is designed to be helpful for all students regardless of which book they use. For now, Sharpen is free in the Apple app store and includes lessons for 18 different courses, from anatomy and business to music, with 50 more coming next month.

Singh has a point that TikTok, as a whole, is hardly a reliable tutor. Misinformation is rampant. A recent study by media monitoring site NewsGuard found that one in five of its videos on popular topics including climate change, Covid-19 or the Russian invasion of Ukraine contained false information, and that TikTok’s search results are routinely more polarizing and less accurate than Google’s.

Nevertheless, the NewsGuard report noted: “In June TikTok launched an ad campaign around the hashtag #TikTokTaughtMe, claiming ‘there is no limit to the knowledge that can be discovered on TikTok. ’” Such as? One account under the #science and #astronomy tags with more than 230,000 followers posts videos that claim the Bible predicted the Big Bang, questions the age of the universe and encourages viewers to doubt modern science. The #psychology tag is riddled with videos that claim to explain human behavior with crude summaries of psychology studies or without citing a source at all.

Martin says he often sees creators rack up views and followers with videos that claim to teach how to solve “the hardest SAT question, which in and of itself does not make sense because the SAT is not one test that is readministered over and over again. It’s a different question every time. ” Yet Gen-Z and Millennial geeks are not giving up on the site just yet.

Forrest Valkai, a 30-year-old graduate student in biomedical anthropology at the University of Tulsa and the brains behind the TikTok account @renegadescienceteacher, with 1. 4 million followers, spends a lot of time on the app combating misinformation. In fact, some of his most popular videos are direct responses to bad information about sex, gender and the theory of evolution.

Last month, Valkai teamed up with other creators to persuade TikTok to remove an account that peddled wild conspiratorial videos about supposed healthy living. “He was posting videos about how you should never take antibiotics because they destroy every cell in your body. And that staring at the sun is good for you because that’s what the Indians used to do,” Valkai says.

After many users reported the videos, TikTok removed the account. “We got rid of that account, but that dude had hundreds of thousands of people watching his videos. That guy had millions of likes,” he complains.

“His comment section was full of people saying, ‘Oh wow, I knew the medical industry was lying to me. ’” Besides fighting misinformation, Valkai stays on TikTok because his popularity there leads to paid speaking invitations. “It’s a great way to have new people discover you or find your work and fall in love with what you do.

That’s amazing,” Valkai says. “The bad thing about TikTok is it has horrendous community guidelines enforcement that’s worse than random. There’s a huge amount of medical misinformation, science misinformation and white supremacy throughout the app that TikTok doesn’t do nearly enough to fix.

” TikTok spokespeople did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but told NewsGuard in September that the app’s community guidelines “make clear that we do not allow harmful misinformation, including medical misinformation, and we will remove it from the platform. We partner with credible voices to elevate authoritative content on topics related to public health, and partner with independent fact-checkers who help us to assess the accuracy of content. ” TikTok removed more than 113 million videos for guidelines violations in the second quarter of 2022, but less than one percent of those videos were canned for violating the integrity and authenticity guidelines that include rules about misinformation.

The bulk of removed videos were taken down for violating rules about minor safety, illegal activities and regulated goods, and adult nudity and sexual activities. Of course, one appeal of TikTok is that anyone can become a creator. Stephanee Beggs, an emergency room nurse with 600,000 TikTok followers, stumbled into her role as an educator, posting her first video in July 2020 as she was studying for the nursing board exam.

“During Covid I had nobody to talk to because we all were at home in quarantine. So I started making videos teaching myself nursing topics,” Beggs explains. “At that time, TikTok was getting really big.

So I posted a video of me teaching a topic onto TikTok, not thinking really anything of it … and it went viral. ” Beggs films her TikToks while dressed in scrubs, before heading to work for a 12-hour shift. In one of her most popular videos, she gives viewers mnemonic devices to remember common injection angles and sites.

Many of her videos feature minute-long overviews of colorful, crowded study sheets she has created for the National Council Licensure Examination, a nationwide test that all future nurses must pass to receive their license. All of her posts rack up tens of thousands of plays—even her video on urinary catheters drew 57,000 views. She uses what she learned in nursing school as well as her experience in the ER to inform her videos.

“Nursing knowledge, for example, the pathophysiology of a heart attack, is not going to change,” Beggs says. “Any textbook you read, any person that explains the pathophysiology of a heart attack, it will always be the same. ” Whether students actually benefit from watching bite-sized educational videos, even accurate ones, is up in the air.

Study after study has shown that mobile phone and social media use negatively impacts academic performance , attention and mood . Andrew Lepp, a professor at Kent State University who studies the impact of mobile phones and social media on academic performance and wellbeing, is skeptical of TikTok as a valuable reference. At best, the app is likely to be more of a distraction than a helpful tool, he contends.

“TikTok is designed to get its claws in you and just not let go,” Lepp says. “So you might open the app with the intent of getting a little bit of guidance or insight on whatever you’re studying, but I bet a lot of people would easily slide back into their non-educational TikTok habits once the app was open. ” Lepp has evidence that social media and phone use can have more insidious consequences.

He recently published a study that showed 15 minutes of social media use had a negative impact on students’ good moods. Another study found that increased cell phone use is correlated with decreased academic performance. It’s unlikely that students could study something in-depth on TikTok, Lepp says.

Social media can be healthy when it’s used “to connect with other people to do something together offline,’’ Lepp observes. “But then there’s the unhealthy approach,’’ he adds. “When you go through the wormhole…Just drifting from one post to another and being distracted and sidetracked and losing 20 or 30 minutes of study time down there before you snap out of it.

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