Barely two weeks into the new year, pediatrician Dr. Nicole Baldwin sat at her computer in her Cincinnati, Ohio practice. She watched as a Facebook notification pinged in. Then another. And another – until it became a flood. 

The comments were vicious: “bloodthirsty lying bitch of the day goes to Dr. Nicole Baldwin,” read one. “Come at me or my child with a needle and I will put it in your jugular,” another said. Dozens more were pinging in every few minutes. 

The reason for the attack? A 15-second TikTok video Baldwin had made the week before, advocating the use of vaccines. She’d only just begun to experiment with the video-sharing platform, used by more than a billion people globally, and especially popular with teenagers.

“When I was thinking about what educational videos I could do, of course one was going to be about vaccines,” she said on Tuesday. “It was literally my fourth video.”