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1. Introduction
Concomitant with the emergence of social media, online video consumption has been proliferating fast globally and having an unprecedented influence on our daily lives, impacting the way people communicate and share information. According to a recent report, people who watch online videos account for 85 percent of Internet users in the USA, while the proportion is as high as 92% in China (Statista, 2019). In addition to video consumption platforms (e.g. YouTube), the market share of mobile-based short video apps has been fast increasing. For example, the world’s most popular short video app, TikTok and its Chinese version, DouYin, reached first place on the global mobile app download list, with more than 65.2 million downloads in July 2020 (China Daily, 2020). In competition with other social media, TikTok became popular due to the capabilities it provides to easily generate and share short-form videos, including elements like music, animation and visual effects (Wang, 2020). In addition, TikTok is expanding its coverage of topics on many aspects of daily life, such as beauty and makeup, education, cooking, wellness and technology (Wright, 2017; Wang, 2020). Educational healthcare content has also become an important part of TikTok’s content ecosystem (BBC News, 2020).
Recently, the short video app demonstrated a vast potential for disseminating health information. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a growing number of health professionals and organizations (e.g. the World Health Organization) have started using TikTok to spread health information and medical knowledge to the public (Basch et al., 2020; Brown, 2020). The TikTok hashtags medicine and doctor have been viewed 1.4 billion and 6.7 billion times, respectively (Comp et al., 2021), and videos with the hashtag coronavirus have received 93.1 billion views (Ostrovsky and Chen, 2020). Because video-based social media platforms are extensively and increasingly being accessed by users to seek online health information, many healthcare professionals are suggesting that there is an urgent need to integrate video-based social media platforms and apps such as TikTok into health communication activities (Eghtesadi and Florea, 2020).
Although leveraging social media for healthcare purposes is not new, the boom in short video apps raises some relatively new questions concerning users’ health information behaviors in regard to short video apps. Before the emergence of such apps, health information...