Quebec doctors fear spread of misinformation as TikTok ban forces them off platform

When Dr. Joseph Dahine created his TikTok account last year, he never imagined he'd amass nearly 37,000 followers — simply for doing his job. 

"I never thought that people would want to hear so much about the ICU and critical care and the health-care stuff, but they do," he said. 

An intensive care specialist at Cité-de-la-Santé hospital in Laval, Dahine has been using the platform to share what goes on behind the scenes at his job, fight misinformation about COVID-19 and other illnesses and even recruit nurses. 

"It's a human business and so showing the human aspect is something that I've enjoyed doing and it seems to resonate with people," he said. 

But on Wednesday, Dahine and several other doctors across Quebec said goodbye to their faithful audiences after receiving a notice from their employers saying they're no longer allowed to create or share TikTok content.

In a Tuesday letter sent to Dahine and his colleagues by the local health authority in Laval and viewed by CBC, staff were told they are prohibited from using TikTok "to generate and share content, to recruit personnel or for any other purpose."

"So a personal phone, a professional phone … you can't use TikTok to produce content, no matter what the purpose of your content is," Dahine said. 

The letter said measures will be put in place in the near future to detect the presence of the app on employees' phones or to prevent it from being downloaded altogether.

By "selectively biasing" against professionals who produce quality content backed by science, Dahine says, he now worries people who use TikTok as their primary source of information will be exposed to misinformation. 

"My concern is huge because if the users stay on the platform but the content creators — the good ones — are leaving, then the user is only going to get exposed to poor quality content and that is not good for society," he said. 

"It could lead to social disruption."

Dr. Mathieu Nadeau-Vallée, a senior anesthesiology resident working at Montreal's Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital, also left his nearly 88,000 TikTok followers a goodbye video on Wednesday. He said several doctors across Quebec have received emails telling them to uninstall the app on their personal phones. 

Nadeau-Vallée, known as "Doctor TikTok" to many, received an award last year for his efforts to debunk misinformation on the app at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Misinformation about vaccines was rampant on social networks, especially on TikTok — a platform that was all the more dangerous because of its powerful algorithm creating echo chambers," he said in a statement to CBC Thursday.