If you are a woman who has spent any time at all scrolling through TikTok, you have almost certainly seen the videos. A woman looks directly into the camera, often with a quiet, earnest, slightly worried expression, and tells you that the birth control pill ruined her skin, her mood, her sex drive, or her body. “Birth control is literally one of the worst things you can put in your body as a woman,” one video insists. “I never have been and I never will be on hormonal birth control,” another creator announces. Some go further and call their generation “the clinical trial for the pill.” It does not take long after searching “contraception,” “the pill,” or “IUD” in the app to fall into what feels like a void: videos of women reading out long lists of side effects that look not too different from the leaflets that come with any medication, side-by-side photos comparing their bodies before and after the pill, and entire series about the strange, intense, and sometimes confusing experience of coming off hormonal contraception. The videos are raw, honest, and deeply compelling. They make you want to check your own pill packet, wonder if the headaches are somehow its fault, and question whether the trust you put in your doctor was misplaced. Maybe you have even shared one. The problem is that, by and large, these videos are not being made by doctors or nurses or medical researchers. They are being made by influencers, self-described naturopaths, hormone coaches, and everyday women who want to share what happened to them. None of that makes their experiences invalid. But it does make the information floating around TikTok incomplete, misleading, and sometimes medically wrong—and for women who are already navigating a confusing healthcare landscape, that can have real consequences.
On one level, it is easy to see why these videos take off. Contraception is deeply personal, and hormonal methods like the pill, the implant, and the hormonal IUD do come with long lists of potential side effects—some real, some rare, some still poorly understood. On TikTok, women line up the package inserts that came with their medication and read them aloud like evidence in a courtroom. They compare their bodies before and after hormonal birth control, pointing to bloating, weight gain, acne, hair loss, or changes in body shape as proof that something is wrong. They talk about mood swings, anxiety, depression, and a sudden loss of interest in intimacy—the kinds of experiences that are easy to dismiss in a doctor’s surgery but impossible to ignore when they are happening to you. Many of these creators have lived through genuinely awful experiences, and their desire to warn other women is completely understandable. But Dr Evonne Ong, a GP and medical adviser at Health Direct, Australia’s national health advice service, says the most common themes in the videos do not match the clinical evidence. “Things like weight gain, acne, it’s often a theme that concerns a lot of younger women,” she says, but the research simply does not support the idea that hormonal contraception causes these problems in every, or even most, people. She also hears constant fears about future fertility—women worried that being on the pill now will make it harder to get pregnant later. “Again, that is not something that is supported by clinical evidence,” she says. Dr Ong is quick to add that most creators are not deliberately spreading misinformation. “Very common themes that we’re seeing about hormonal contraception include side effects and how common certain side effects can be,” she says, but personal stories are not the same as medical facts. The gap between how something feels and what the evidence actually says is where the fear grows.
The scale of this phenomenon is enormous, and researchers are starting to pay attention. A study published earlier this year in the International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics found that the majority of TikTok videos about birth control were created by non-medical professionals and focused on personal experiences rather than evidence. Then a 2025 study from La Trobe University in Melbourne went deeper. The research team examined 100 videos about contraception with a combined audience of nearly 5 billion views—a number so large it is hard to comprehend. What they found should give any woman pause. Half of the videos came from “general uploaders” with no health background. Fifteen per cent came from people who described themselves as hormone health coaches, and another 15 per cent from self-labelled health educators. Genuine medical professionals—doctors, nurses, researchers—accounted for just 10 per cent of the content. Lead author Caroline de Moel said the overall quality and reliability of the information was poor. Around half of the creators explicitly discouraged the use of hormonal contraception, including the pill, implants, injections, and hormonal IUDs. Many pushed “natural” alternatives such as cycle tracking, but they often failed to explain the limitations. Cycle tracking only works if you have regular cycles, a stable lifestyle, and a clear understanding of your body; it is not the right choice for everyone, and it is not the same as twenty-first-century contraception. Dr de Moel is careful not to dismiss the creators. Personal stories are valuable and deserve to be heard. But as she says, they are case studies, not scientific evidence.
Perhaps the most unsettling part of this whole picture is that it is not an accident. It is a structural feature of social media. TikTok’s algorithm does not care whether something is true; it cares whether it keeps people watching. And the kind of content that keeps people watching is content that makes them feel something strongly—fear, anger, outrage, or a sense of being let down by the medical establishment. Negative experiences about contraception are perfectly designed for this. They are emotional, they feel consequential, and they invite comments and shares from women who have similar stories. Dr de Moel explains it directly: “The problem with TikTok is the content that provokes the most emotional reactions such as fear or anger … they get the most views, comments and shares. The algorithm doesn’t check if the content is accurate; it just rewards engagement so the most visible content is not the most reliable one.” That is not a judgment on the women who post these videos; it is simply how digital platforms work. The same algorithm that surfaces a life-changing recipe or a satisfying cleaning hack also surfaces a woman warning you that the pill will destroy your fertility. And because the algorithm learns from interactions, the more women comment “me too,” the more those videos get pushed into new feeds. The study also found that roughly a third of content creators expressed distrust of healthcare professionals, which adds an extra layer of fear: women are not just being given incomplete information, they are being taught to ignore the very people most qualified to help. Dr de Moel believes the solution is not to leave TikTok to the quacks. She wants real health professionals to make accurate, engaging content—not dry monologues, but the kind of videos that can compete for attention. “We want their expertise out there; it needs to compete with all the stuff that’s not correct,” she says. It is a big ask for overworked clinicians, but the alternative is abandoning the digital public square to the loudest and least trustworthy voices.
Given how much confusion is out there, it is heartening to see that governments are finally paying attention. In Australia, the issue has become a health policy priority. Assistant Minister for Health and Women Rebecca White has been outspoken about the problem. “We see that particularly when it comes to women’s healthcare and specifically when it comes to contraceptive care,” she says. “There’s a lot of mis and disinformation that is confusing for people as they’re making decisions about their contraception choices.” The federal government has responded by teaming up with Health Direct to create the Contraception Options Finder, an online tool it says is the first of its kind in Australia. The tool is designed to help people—men, women, and gender diverse people—figure out which contraceptive methods might work for them, based on evidence rather than anecdotes. It takes the form of an easy-to-use quiz. It asks questions about your health, your life, your preferences, and your priorities, then offers a tailored set of options, along with information about which methods are subsidised by the Australian government under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and which ones are more expensive. Dr Ong, who helped develop it, says the aim is to give people a strong starting point before they walk into a doctor’s room. “It gives a really good indication of particularly which medications and options are funded by the Australian government under the PBS and which ones aren’t,” she says. The tool is not prescriptive; it doesn’t say “this one is best” or “this one is bad.” It simply opens up a conversation, so that women can ask better questions and feel confident that their choices are informed by something more solid than TikTok. The context is stark: doctors consider the IUD one of the most effective reversible contraceptives, but misinformation, cost, and a lack of trained providers have stopped many Australian women from accessing it.
Underneath all of this is a very human story. People who have suffered—or believe they have suffered—because of a contraceptive method want to warn others. That impulse comes from a good place. It is generous, protective, and caring. But the same mechanism that amplifies those warnings also hides the quieter stories of women who have taken hormonal contraception for years and felt fine, or women whose IUD turned out to be the best decision they ever made. They do not make dramatic videos because there is nothing dramatic to confess. As Dr Ong puts it, “People are more likely to publish things when they’ve had a bad experience with them because they want to warn the public. They are coming from a place of good intention generally, but it’s important to remember that they are only a handful of people. People who have had generally really good experiences are perhaps less likely to talk about them on social media.” That asymmetry is not something any single study or tool can fix. It is a reminder that social media is a distorted mirror, not a medical journal. So what should a woman do with all this? Don’t delete TikTok unless you want to. Don’t ignore your own body, and don’t dismiss the women who share their pain. But remember that your body is not a comment section. Your choices are not determined by what goes viral. The truth is often more boring than the algorithm would like it to be: the best contraception is the one that fits your health, your lifestyle, and your values, and the only way to truly find it is to talk with a real clinician, ask questions, and weigh the evidence. Take the stories seriously, but take them with a pinch of salt. You deserve information that makes you feel empowered, not afraid—and you are never going to find that by listening to one TikTok creator alone.