How You Ask Shapes What You Get

Auditing how breast-cancer query framing shapes misinformation exposure in TikTok Search

Research question

How does the way people phrase breast-cancer searches on TikTok shape their exposure to health misinformation?

Audit design

We conduct a controlled sock-puppet audit of TikTok Search using 30 fresh accounts across six experimental conditions. The design crosses:

  • Information-seeking framing: Medical Information, Alternative Medicine, and Peer Narrative
  • Breast-cancer context: Symptom Noticing and Active Treatment

The audit analyzes 9,020 usable search-result exposures annotated with a validated vision-language model pipeline.

Key findings

  1. Query framing strongly shapes exposure. Alternative Medicine queries returned misinformation in 54.1% of cancer-relevant results for Symptom Noticing and 53.5% for Active Treatment.

  2. Clinical framing reduces but does not eliminate risk. Medical Information queries still returned possible misinformation in 6.3–7.1% of cancer-relevant results.

  3. Misinformation is not confined to the top results. For Alternative Medicine queries, problematic content appeared throughout the rankings, and its comments were more likely to promote unsupported treatments or opposition to standard care.

Why it matters

Search queries are explicit signals of what users need. These findings show that how those needs are expressed can substantially change misinformation exposure, making query-driven search an important target for platform audits alongside recommendation feeds.

Citation

Jamie, P., Hosseinmardi, H., Rezapour, R., Pessianzadeh, A., Ganz, P. A., & Ghasemian, A. (2026). How You Ask Shapes What You Get: Auditing Breast-Cancer Misinformation in TikTok Search. arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.13147.