TikTok removes videos promoting birth control misinformation

TikTok has removed videos promoting birth control misinformation after The Independent found that some influencers were spreading unproven claims to millions of users.

An investigation by The Independent and tech company Alethea revealed misleading videos claimed the risks of birth control, such as cancer or psychological side effects, outweigh its benefits.

Some videos, since taken down, also suggested that a herbal supplement called Queen Anne’s Lace could act as a contraceptive, and promoted the idea that women should “detox” after stopping their birth control prescription.

The TikTok videos, which appeared generic, engaging, and aesthetically pleasing, were posted by three prominent wellness influencers – reaching 15 million viewers on the platform between February 2021 and July 2024 and being shared 21,000 times.

Out of the 1,449 total videos posted by the three influencers during the period, 115 were tagged with #birthcontrol.

Using data collection, Alethea – a leading technology company specialising in online risk detection and mitigation – identified the top myths being spread by three prominent TikTok influencers.

The Independent also collated and flagged hashtags used specifically by these influencers on TikTok, which aimed to push this content to a wider audience than just their followers, such as #womenshealth #truth #holistichealth #fertilityawareness and #holistichealing. TikTok did not respond when asked if it took action on these.

Many of the videos were also published on platforms such as Instagram and YouTube.

Have you come across this kind of content online? Email: hebe.campbell@independent.co.uk

Dr Viki Male, senior lecturer in reproductive immunology at Imperial College London, told The Independent: “Contraception, like any medication, has risks – but they are low and far lower than the risks of pregnancy.

“There’s no strong evidence that Queen Anne’s Lace works as a contraceptive – it’s certainly not something I would rely on. In communities that try to use herbal birth control, they have a really high rate of unplanned pregnancies.

“It’s a myth that the longer you take birth control, the longer it takes to get pregnant. Studies show no such ‘wash-out’ period exists for any hormonal contraceptives except for the injection. The injection does take a little while to leave your system, but that is exactly what it’s designed to do.”

However, Dr Male did point out that some people taking contraception may experience side effects, adding: “With every medication, there are always risks, but hormonal contraception is really safe and effective.”

After The Independent presented the social media giant with its evidence, TikTok removed content relating to claims that the risks of birth control – like cancer or psychological side effects – outweigh its benefits and the false claim that Queen Anne’s Lace can work as a contraceptive. It did not remove videos relating to detoxing after taking birth control, however.

It also removed content relating to these topics by influencers that The Independent had not flagged. The videos specifically violated TikTok’s policies around medical misinformation, the app said.

Instagram and TikTok are now the preferred search engines for Gen-Zers when seeking local results, according to a study carried out in 2024 by marketing technology vendor SOCI.

For Gen Z internet users in the US, Instagram was first, with 67 per cent saying they use it for searches. TikTok is the second choice at 62 per cent of the 18 to 24 demographic search, while Google is third at 61 per cent.

TikTok, along with Instagram and other social media platforms, has recently come under scrutiny for allowing misinformation to spread, especially around women’s health.

Another study in 2024 found that women are among the largest group of TikTok users in the United States and may be especially affected by the dissemination of health information on TikTok.

The research suggested that health professionals and health communication scholars need to proactively consider using TikTok as a platform for disseminating health information to young women, because they are using TikTok for it despite preferring information from health professionals.

TikTok said it removed content that violated its policies regarding medical misinformation. Its community guidelines prohibit inaccurate, misleading, or false content that may cause significant harm to individuals or society, regardless of intent.

However, the guidelines allow TikTok users to share their own stories or experiences about medical treatment as long as they do not contain harmful misinformation.

TikTok defines harmful health misinformation as inaccurate medical advice that discourages people from getting appropriate medical care for a life-threatening disease, or other misinformation that may cause negative health effects on an individual’s life.

The app announced a year-long collaboration with the World Health Organisation in 2024 to promote reliable mental wellbeing content and fight disinformation through the Fides Network of trusted healthcare professionals, who are also TikTok creators.

Sixth Sense star Haley Joel Osment called cop ‘Nazi’ during arrest

Oscar-nominated actor Haley Joel Osment was caught on camera hurling insults and an antisemitic slur at cops when he was arrested for public intoxication.

The Sixth Sense star has been charged with public intoxication and cocaine possession after the incident earlier this month at a Northern California ski resort. He has since apologized for his behaviour and said he had ‘let the Jewish community down’.

In police bodycam footage obtained by the New York Post, Osment is seen arguing with officers at the scene in Mammoth Lake on April 8.

“I’ve been kidnapped by a f***ing Nazi”, he says at one point after his arrest while being driven away from the scene.

The footage begins with Osment appearing hostile as he struggles with officers while looking intoxicated.

Refusing to give his name, the 37-year-old drops to his knees as he is arrested before officers repeatedly ask him to stand up. While being picked up, he says: “I’m being attacked.”

Footage then shows police noting they have found suspected cocaine residue on a $20 bill in his ski helmet. “I think there’s cocaine in that,” one officer says. Osment is placed into the back of a police car and driven away.

From the driver’s bodycam, the actor can be heard saying to officers: “I was decent to you and you , and you are a f***ing k***.” He also says: “You’re f***ing with my life.”

In response to the recording, the actor apologised in a statement to the New York Post.

He said: “I’m absolutely horrified by my behavior. Had I known I used this disgraceful language in the throes of a blackout, I would have spoken up sooner.”

Referring to losing his home in the Californian wildfire, he added: “The past few months of loss and displacement have broken me down to a very low emotional place. But that’s no excuse for using this disgusting word. From the bottom of my heart, I apologize to absolutely everyone that this hurts. What came out of my mouth was nonsensical garbage – I’ve let the Jewish community down and it devastates me.”

The Mono County District Attorney’s office announced the misdemeanor charges Thursday against the actor, who is due to be arraigned on July 7.

Osment rose to fame and received a best supporting actor Oscar nomination for starring opposite Bruce Willis in M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller “The Sixth Sense.”

Two years later he starred in Steven Spielberg’s “A.I.” and has worked consistently as a voice actor since then. He’s also appeared in the television series “The Kominsky Method” and “What We Do in the Shadows.”

Osment is among the thousands of people who lost their homes in January’s devastating Eaton Fire in the Altadena area near Los Angeles.

In 2006, Osment was charged with drunken driving and marijuana possession after crashing his car into a mailbox in the Los Angeles area and breaking a rib.

Four-foot-long caiman seized in police search of Essex home

A four-foot-long caiman has been seized by police in a search of a home in Essex as two people were arrested on suspicion of drugs and weapons offences.

The animal, which has now been handed over to the RSPCA, was among the items found by officers executing a warrant at an address in Aveley near Grays on Thursday.

A significant cannabis haul and several weapons including knives were also discovered and seized.

A 36-year-old man, from Purfleet, was arrested on suspicion of production of cannabis, contravention of the dangerous wildlife act and possession of an offensive weapon, while a 35-year-old woman was arrested for the same offences as well as on suspicion of possession with intent to supply drugs, Essex Police said.

Both have since been released under investigation.

Inspector Dan Selby said: “Drugs cause misery in our communities and we work hard to tackle their production and sale.

“We know this matters to the public and we value our neighbourhoods so these issues matter to us.

“We are also ensuring the welfare of the caiman and have left it in the hands of the RSPCA.”

Caimans live in marshes, swamps, lakes, and mangrove rivers. The animals are native to Central and South America.

Alfie Allen: ‘There has to be something on the line for it to matter’

Play the man, not the cards.” It’s a credo that goes to the heart of the game of poker – and it’s central to Patrick Marber’s 1995 play Dealer’s Choice, which is being revived at London’s Donmar Theatre this month. Poker is a simple game of statistical probability, but also a complex mesh of psychology and personality, and no one wins by relying on maths alone. In poker, the harder someone tries to make themselves unreadable, the more likely they are to show everything. It’s this sense of enigma that is at the heart of so many of Alfie Allen’s performances, which, in recent years, have encompassed a Tony-nominated turn on Broadway, primetime BBC dramas and acclaimed film roles. There’s a sense of self-containment but also of still waters running deep. It’s no surprise that the play’s producers have cast Allen as Frankie, considered the best poker player among the friends who play a weekly game together in what was Marber’s debut.

Having caught the laddish zeitgeist in its year of release, Dealer’s Choice has proved endlessly revivable; it’s knotty and complex enough to plausibly return and make sense in any number of different eras and contexts. It centres around a group of men – all working in the same restaurant, all struggling with thwarted dreams and all hoping, slightly desperately for something better. They’re united by their poker games; a realm in which they can take responsibility and simultaneously surrender it.

In common with many of the cast members, Allen had never played poker before rehearsals for the play began. But their first revelation was the most important. “We learnt that there’s got to be something on the line for it to matter,” he says. “We were all just betting with fake chips, but we realised that it doesn’t really mean anything unless you’re playing with your own money. And as an actor, that’s definitely at the core of what I try and figure out about every part I play: what’s at stake? There are the obvious things that are at stake in terms of money but you try and dig a little deeper.”

In its Donmar incarnation, the play sits comfortably within the current discourse around masculinity. Allen’s Frankie is a cocky but slightly brittle young alpha-male. He’s not only the best poker player in the group but a prolific ladies’ man to boot. Is there, though, slightly less to him than meets the eye? As the group bickers over the cards, all of them end up unconsciously revealing slightly more about themselves than they’d like.

This is probably not a trait that can ever be applied to Alfie Allen in person. There’s never any danger of him overplaying his hand. When we meet in the Donmar’s Covent Garden offices, he’s unfailingly affable despite a long day of rehearsals – a process he seems to be enjoying every bit as much as the actual prospect of performance. He’s sympathetic and amused rather than irritable when my recording device malfunctions and generous with his time. And yet there’s a slight sense of guardedness about him.

And really, that’s not too surprising. As the son of famously garrulous and unguarded actor, presenter, comic and general overlord of Eighties and Nineties excess, Keith Allen, Alfie learnt about the pleasures and perils of the limelight at a young age. The success – and tabloid-related travails – of his singer-sister Lily presumably drove the point home. Questions about his family elicit lengthy pauses and not much more. You suspect he’s not so much unwilling to talk about them as slightly sick of the questions. “My family is my family, you know?” he says.

What, you suspect, does animate him is his work, which is increasingly both varied and impressive. Dealer’s Choice captures the robust, often combative nuances of male friendship brilliantly. “That’s sometimes how a strong friendship is built,” as Allen puts it. “You can go to the extremes and then kind of go back to ‘actually, we’re alright aren’t we?’ He’s also modest enough to give Marber most of the credit for this. “Patrick’s writing really does the work for you in that respect,” he says. “There are no big, performative monologues in this. It’s always about what the other person is doing. That’s how it becomes a proper dance.”

But it takes two to tango. And more and more, it seems Allen is building a portfolio of vulnerable men in extremis. Alongside Frankie, there’s his wracked, tormented Theon Greyjoy in Game of Thrones (“an amazing, crazy 10 years of my life… that took me to places I didn’t think I could go”). The torture of Theon in the show pivoted around castration, emasculation and humiliation. Last year, Allen played the title role in McVeigh, a timely exploration of America’s deadliest domestic terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, who perpetrated the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, killing 167 people, including 19 children. And in 2022, there was Steven Knight’s SAS: Rogue Heroes in which he played another real-life character, Jock Lewes, the founding principal training officer of the regiment and a man who combined extreme personal discipline with a maverick streak of wildness.

In realising his screen version of Lewes, Allen did something very characteristic. He offered up a performance that was expressive while being entirely without ego. “I didn’t want to veer too far from the version of him I’d read about – I just looked at the love letters that he wrote to his wife-to-be,” he says. “There’s a whole book of them and that was my source material. I didn’t really want to jazz it up or put my spin on it – I wanted to stay true to what the real life version was”.

It’s tempting here to make a comparison to Alfie’s father Keith, who, for all of his charisma (in fact, probably, because of it), seems to essentially play Keith Allen in every role. Alfie Allen was famously raised in the public eye – Lily has spoken of evenings where the siblings were left upstairs at the Groucho Club while their dad enjoyed himself in the bar downstairs – and has explored the party animal lifestyle himself. But there’s something else in a character like Jock Lewes; a sense of ingrained self-denial that feels like a revealingly antithetical response to this. “Jock was an aloof disciplinarian,” Allen says. “He was raised in a Protestant household, so maybe [the SAS] was his outlet. It gave him a way of channelling his need for structure.” Could something similar be said of Allen himself – and in particular, his ability to disappear into character?

Like the culture itself, it feels like Allen has come a long way. He and Theo Barklem-Biggs (fellow SAS Rogue Hero and one of his co-stars in Dealer’s Choice) set up a therapeutic forum for the cast and crew while on set in Morocco. “There was a bunch of people who didn’t know each other, all plonked in the middle of the desert,” Allen explains. “Which is a bit like what it would be like in the army I guess! It was really good to have that kind of outlet, where everyone felt they could sit around and speak to each other.” For the duration of the run at the Donmar, he and Barklem-Biggs are sharing a flat in central London – there’s a sense of intimacy and honesty, both in and out of character.

So when Allen talks about what’s at stake in the context of Dealer’s Choice, it’s clear that he’s talking about more than money. Dealer’s Choice, like most of the actor’s recent parts, is about how men talk to each other – and in some cases, what happens when they don’t.

But have things moved on since the play was first staged? “I guess they have in terms of talking about love and intimacy and mental health,” he says. “Obviously, I was only eight or nine in 1995 so it wasn’t all that evident to me then but in terms of things being better now, maybe then there was just a kind of unspoken understanding… that sometimes men would just bury things and move on. Whereas now, I think we feel more free to build on that and talk.” In terms of playing the man and not the cards, it feels like Dealer’s Choice – and Alfie Allen himself – has found itself in tune with another cultural moment. He might not be a born gambler. But he certainly isn’t playing it safe either. He’d almost certainly be an excellent poker player, I suggest. “I’d like to think I could be a good bluffer,” he replies. “But it’s all about knowing when to bet.”

‘Dealer’s Choice’ is at the Donmar Warehouse until 7 June