YouTube as a source of information on skin bleaching: a content analysis

Summary

Background

Skin bleaching is a common, yet potentially harmful body modification practice.

Aim

To describe the characteristics of the most widely viewed YouTube™ videos related to skin bleaching.

Methods

The search term 'skin bleaching' was used to identify the 100 most popular English-language YouTube videos relating to the topic. Both descriptive and specific information were noted.

Results

Among the 100 manually coded skin-bleaching YouTube videos in English, there were 21 consumer-created videos, 45 internet-based news videos, 30 television news videos and 4 professional videos. Excluding the 4 professional videos, we limited our content categorization and regression analysis to 96 videos. Approximately 93% (89/96) of the most widely viewed videos mentioned changing how you look and 74% (71/96) focused on bleaching the whole body. Of the 96 videos, 63 (66%) of videos showed/mentioned a transformation. Only about 14% (13/96) mentioned that skin bleaching is unsafe. The likelihood of a video selling a skin bleaching product was 17 times higher in internet videos compared with consumer videos (OR = 17.00, 95% CI 4.58–63.09, P < 0.001). Consumer-generated videos were about seven times more likely to mention making bleaching products at home compared with internet-based news videos (OR = 6.86, 95% CI 1.77–26.59, P < 0.01).

Conclusions

The most viewed YouTube video on skin bleaching was uploaded by an internet source. Videos made by television sources mentioned more information about skin bleaching being unsafe, while consumer-generated videos focused more on making skin-bleaching products at home.

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