author: Bart Swiatek
TikTok has a Plastic Surgery Ad Problem
Since October last year, more than 120,000 videos devoted to plastic surgery, especially rhinoplasty, have appeared on TikTok. Some of them are ads of plastic surgeons who bypass the platform's restrictions. Content of this type is very popular among teens, which is a concern for experts.
IN A NUTSHELL:
- A wealth of videos on plastic surgery, including surgeon ads, has recently been published on TikTok;
- The platform has tried to ban this type of content, but "doctors" find ways to circumvent the restrictions;
- Ads are often shown to very young people, feeding on their complexes and a desire for acceptance from peers.
Business Insider reports that TikTok advertises the services of plastic surgeons to teenagers. The company claims to have banned this type of content, but in practice it is still very easy to find it. The website's editors checked the report - after setting up an account and setting account's age at fourteen, it took only eight minutes for the first spot devoted to the topic to appear in the For You section.
The most popular are advertisements about one particular procedure - so-called rhinoplasty, i.e. nose correction. It is worth noting that the topic arouses great interest. The total number of views for videos with #plasticsurgery hashtag reached a dizzying 3.8 billion, while in the case of #nosejobcheck (it includes mainly before and after comparisons) it is 1.6 billion. Rhinoplasty even got its own sound on TikTok. Since October last year, it has been used in nearly 117 thousand videos. The trend owes its popularity to, among others, the post by TikTok celebrity, sixteen-year-old Charla D'Amelio.
One of the doctors advertising on the platform is Dr Kim Patrick Murray from Miami. He admits openly that he performed surgeries on patients under fourteen years old. According to him, this is not a problem, and the bigger threat to the popularity of TikTok are the videos presenting teenagers dancing in bikinis.
"Rhinoplasty is a relatively tame topic compared to a lot of other stuff on TikTok," he told Insider. "If you want to look at the negatives, you have worse things like teenagers dancing in bikinis. Operating on somebody that young could be a little controversial. But for me, the advantages of considering rhinoplasty at that young age allow the person to grow and be comfortable in their own skin and that far outweighs the negatives," says Dr Murray.
However, other experts have no doubt that this type of advertising can be extremely harmful to teenagers who are very sensitive to any shortcomings in their appearance.
"Whether it's through paid promotion or medical practitioners using hashtags, we think it's completely unacceptable and inappropriate that videos like these are reaching young people under the age of 18.
A lot of the time, these operations are promoted based on wellbeing, saying that they will improve how you will feel about yourself. I would like medical practitioners to be more conscious of who might see their content and to show more thoughtfulness to psychological reasons as to why people are seeking these operations.
We know that a lot of these clinics use fairly predatory techniques when it comes to self-promoting their work and that is a concern," said Dr Antonis Kousoulis, Director of the Mental Health Foundation.
It is worth noting that TikTok is used by a very large group of young people - according to data collected by Statista, people under the age of nineteen represent the largest group of users (32.5%). The New York Times goes even further, pointing out that even one third of Tiktok users may have yet to turn fourteen. According to the rules of the platform, the minimum age required to create an account is thirteen, but this is not verified in any way, so it is very easy to circumvent this restriction.
