The province blocked the app from being used on government phones, but some hospitals seem to be going a step further
Last year, when Dr. Joseph Dahine made his TikTok account, he had no idea that he would get almost 37,000 followers just for doing his job.
“I never thought that people would want to hear so much about the ICU, critical care, and health care, but they do,” he said.
As an intensive care specialist at Cité-de-la-Santé hospital in Laval, Dahine has been using the platform to talk about what goes on behind the scenes at his job, fight false information about COVID-19 and other illnesses, and even recruit nurses.
“It’s a people business, so showing the people side is something I’ve enjoyed doing, and people seem to like it,” he said.
But on Wednesday, Dahine and a number of other doctors in Quebec had to say goodbye to their loyal fans because their employers told them they could no longer make or share TikTok content.
In a letter sent to Dahine and his colleagues on Tuesday and seen by CBC, the local health authority in Laval said that they can’t use TikTok “to create and share content, to recruit personnel, or for any other reason.”
“So there’s a personal phone, a business phone, and… TikTok can’t be used to make content, no matter what you want to do with it “Dahine said.
In the letter, it was said that soon, steps would be taken to find out if the app was already on employees’ phones or to stop it from being downloaded.
“This is a matter of public health.
Dahine says that by “selectively biasing” against professionals who make good content backed by science, people who use TikTok as their main source of information will be exposed to false information.
“My worry is huge because if the users stay on the platform but the good content creators leave, the users will only see bad content, which is bad for society,” he said.
“It could cause trouble in society.”
Dr. Mathieu Nadeau-Vallée, a senior anesthesiology resident at the Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital in Montreal, also posted a goodbye video to his nearly 88,000 TikTok followers on Wednesday. He said that several doctors in Quebec have gotten emails telling them to remove the app from their own phones.
Many people call Nadeau-Vallée “Doctor TikTok.” Last year, he won an award for his work to clear up false information on the app during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“There was a lot of false information about vaccines on social networks, especially on TikTok, which was especially dangerous because its powerful algorithm created echo chambers,” he told CBC Thursday.
“So I decided to act as a counterweight by making content based on scientific facts and answering some viral videos that spread false information. My main goal was to give people enough information about the vaccine to help them make a decision that could be very important.”
He said that it is “essential” for scientists and doctors to be on TikTok.
He said, “This is about public health.” “The World Health Organization’s main goal is to fight against false information, which is becoming more and more known as a “infodemic,” he said.
Both Dahine and Nadeau-Vallée said they will keep their accounts open so that people can still watch and interact with the hundreds of health-related videos they have posted in the past.
CISSS goes against government guideline
Following the lead of the federal government, Quebec banned the app from government phones on February 28. They said it was a privacy risk because the Chinese government owns a part of TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, and Chinese laws let the government access user data.
But both the federal government and the provincial government said that employees could still use the app on their own devices.
When asked about the letter it sent to its employees, the CISSS de Laval wouldn’t say why its TikTok ban applies to health care workers’ personal phones or answer other questions about how they use the app on their own time.
In a short statement, it said that it is following the rules set by the Ministry of Health.
But in a statement to CBC on Thursday, the Ministry of Health said that its TikTok ban only applies to Quebec government mobile devices. “Otherwise, using social media for personal use and on non-government devices remains a personal choice that is allowed,” the Ministry said.
Dahine, for his part, says that the rules set by his local health board are too vague and don’t get to the heart of the problem.
“Right now, the ban only affects making content for that one platform,” he said. “It doesn’t really fit with what we’ve read about the problem, which is that the app itself is collecting information it shouldn’t be collecting.”
“I don’t want to defend a dangerous product, but if it is dangerous, then it should be banned for everyone.”