By Garry Maddox
TikTok will ban videos that encourage tanning and will add warnings about the risks of skin cancer, after doctors expressed concern that the video-sharing platform has encouraged dangerous levels of sun exposure through specific hashtags and challenges.
A “sunburnt challenge”, which sees user show-off their worst sunburns and had recently become popular among young Australians on the app will also be banned.
TikTok will ban videos that encourage tanning and run warnings about the risks of skin cancer in a campaign that will run over summer.Credit: TikTok
Users who search for “beach”, “sunburn’, “summer sun” and similar hashtags will also see a pop-up banner for an anti-tanning campaign. The “Tanning. It’s Cooked” campaign will highlight that Australia has the highest incidence of melanoma in the world.
TikTok has launched the campaign after the joint medical director of Melanoma Institute Australia, Professor Georgina Long, slammed social media and television for normalising, glamorising and trivialising tanning and sunburn.
Speaking at the National Press Club in September, she said a “sunburnt tanlines” hashtag on TikTok had more than 200 million views, largely teens and young adults showing off their red raw burns.
Long urged media, advertisers and influencers to “change the cultural narrative around sunburn and tanning”.
The institute projects that melanoma will kill 16,000 people, leave 350,000 living with the disease and cost the nation $8.7 billion by 2030 unless action is taken quickly.
The general manager of TikTok in Australia and New Zealand, Lee Hunter, said the company would assess videos featuring tanning and take down those that contravened its community guidelines.
The joint medical directors of Melanoma Institute Australia, Professor Georgina Long (left) and Professor Richard Scolyer, with Olympic swimming champion Cate Campbell who all spoke about skin cancer at the National Press Club in September.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
“Some people might just be talking about how they got a tan at the beach and other people might be talking about how they want to charge people for a commercial tanning bed,” he said. “We’re removing videos that promote unsafe activities related to the dangers of tanning.”
The campaign will encourage users to create videos telling personal stories about sun safety.
“We hope that we can save some lives,” Hunter said. “And we hope that people can really start to change the message around the dangers of tanning.”
Joint medical director of the Melanoma Institute, Professor Richard Scolyer, welcomed the TikTok campaign.
An image from TikTok’s campaign with Melanoma Institute Australia.Credit: TikTok
“Australians are obsessed with tanning, particularly young people, largely driven by social media,” he said. “Impressionable young Aussies are being flooded with images of tanned bodies - the deeper the tan, the better.
“But we see too often the devastating health impacts of tanning.”
Scolyer said getting a tan remained “a cultural norm” even though an Australian was diagnosed with melanoma every six hours.
“TikTok picked up the phone days after the Press Club address and said ‘we want to work with you to change this’,” he said. “The result is they’re banning a hashtag that we highlighted as promoting dangerous behaviour - the sunburnt challenge.
“And they’re putting sun-safe warnings and links to Melanoma Institute Australia on any searches and content around tanning and summer, which we think is absolutely fantastic.”
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Email Garry Maddox at gmaddox@smh.com.au and follow him on Twitter at @gmaddox.