Amid an endless stream of memes and lighthearted videos, pseudoscience content is rife on TikTok. From ineffective coronavirus cures to anti-vaccination content, the video sharing app has become fertile ground for all manner of disinformation.

Owned by the Beijing-based tech company ByteDance, the app brings together the most scrollable qualities of social media: unlimited content, served up to users by a tireless algorithm and hundreds of thousands of custom image filters. In just four years, the app’s rise has been meteoric, reaching two billion downloads last October and beating older platforms such as Twitter and Snapchat in terms of total active users.

TikTok’s popularity has highlighted a number of vulnerabilities, including users who share videos that promote unscientific and, in some cases, dangerous medical advice, diets and treatments. In response, it issued an expanded policy on misleading content in early 2020, adding a “misleading information” category to its reporting toolkit for users. In the first half of that year, more than 104 million videos were removed from the app for violations. 

Here are five anti-science trends discovered by Coda Story: