The science influencers going viral on TikTok to fight misinformation

Scientists and medical experts are countering climate denialism, vaccine scepticism and wellness pseudoscience on social media.

One of Simon Clark’s most popular TikTok videos begins with him playing the part of a clueless climate contrarian. Adopting the overconfident tone that is common among social-media influencers, he proclaims: “Renewables are a scam!”

Cut to the real Clark, who has a PhD in stratospheric dynamics and uses the handle @simonoxfphys, as he dismantles several myths about renewable energy using a deadpan style and a torrent of charts. The video, with almost 180,000 views, is an effort to fight misinformation by meeting people where they are, he says.

Clark started making YouTube videos more than 15 years ago as a master’s student in physics at the University of Oxford, UK. He wanted to help others learn about getting into elite universities and navigating the collegiate system. After he got his PhD from the University of Exeter, UK, he decided to make content creation a full-time career. “The natural thing in my field was talking about the climate crisis,” he says, “the physical causes behind it, the solutions we have to it, and increasingly at the moment, why we aren’t implementing those solutions.”

Clark is now also on Instagram, Facebook and the live-streaming service Twitch, where he leans on his scientific credentials to both communicate science and combat misinformation. He is one of many scientists and medical experts who are countering the flood of anti-science advice and rhetoric across social-media platforms.

According to a 2025 report by the Reuters Institute in Oxford and the University of Oxford, 65% of people worldwide now consume video on social media¹. Increasingly, many individuals, especially young people, get their news from these platforms. But a lot of that ‘news’ is created by anti-science influencers who build loyal followings, using their position as opinion leaders to promote climate denialism, conspiracy theories, vaccine scepticism, autism myths, sham treatments and other pseudoscience.

A study last year, for example, analysed nearly 1,000 Instagram and TikTok posts about controversial medical screening tests. It found that the posts were overwhelmingly misleading — and that the people posting often had financial interests in the treatment². Another study analysed the 100 most popular TikTok videos on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and found more than half to be misleading³. Yet the videos collectively had more than 280 million views.

To counteract this deluge of bad information, Clark and other pro-science content creators are taking strategies straight out of the influencer playbook.

Building audiences

Social scientist Louisa Ha at Bowling Green State University in Ohio says that content creators who intend to mislead use clear tactics: “They pretend to be authentic, trustworthy and knowledgeable,” she says. They blend facts with misinformation to make it hard to tell what is credible. “The best lie is one that mixes seemingly authoritative sources and some facts with false data and false arguments and appeals to people’s beliefs and fears,” says Ha.

Whether a video provokes people to engage with it matters more than the video’s accuracy, or even whether people agree with it, says Clark. The longer people linger on a video and the more they comment, the more likely it is that lots of people will see it.

Encouraging such engagement is a tactic that Clark uses. In 2020, he made a 40-minute YouTube video on the debate over nuclear power, focusing on why some people see it as the best low-carbon technology whereas others say the risk of catastrophe is too great. He knew that the topic would be controversial. “I imagine that no matter what I say, I’m about to piss a lot of people off,” he says in the video. And he was right: it has more than 500,000 views, and nearly 6,000 comments.

Comments tend to be highly valued by engagement algorithms. Some creators do simple things, such as wearing a shirt backwards, so that viewers will post a comment pointing it out, says Clark. “It’s stupid”, he says, “but it works, so I guess it’s not stupid.”

Misinformation abounds in the health and wellness space. As a registered dietician, Megan Rossi was struck by how many of her patients took diet advice from blogs and other online content. Frustrated by the lack of good science information, she started her own gut-health focused Instagram account @theguthealthdoctor in 2015, featuring video explainers about topics such as bloating, fibre, exercise and sleep, as well as offering recipe suggestions. (She has also developed a food brand and started a company that sells live bacteria supplements.)

Rossi leans into her credibility as a research fellow in nutritional sciences at King’s College London, often referring to herself as a “gut specialist/dietician”. She says that she’s careful to give advice based only on peer-reviewed evidence, and she typically cites her sources. Commenters often say things such as “very helpful” and “great info”, and thank her for not engaging in fearmongering.

The advent of social media has created communities that can more easily connect across time and space, and so has introduced a new type of opinion leader, says Amelia Burke-Garcia, director of the Center for Health Communication Science at the University of Chicago in Illinois. What’s important, says Burke-Garcia, who has been working with influencers in the public-health space since 2008 (“although we didn’t call them influencers then”), is to support credible voices and evidence in these communities.

In a qualitative study published last year, Burke-Garcia, public-health researcher Amy Leader at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and their colleagues asked ten influencers of colour who had children aged 9 to 14 to spread the word about vaccination against human papillomavirus⁴. The influencers, whom the researchers provided with a fact sheet, created emotionally charged posts that acknowledged parents’ fears and used storytelling to describe their personal journeys towards a vaccination decision. Surveys of people who follow these influencers, Burke-Garcia says, revealed that the followers were more likely to consider vaccinating their children after hearing from someone to whom they could relate.

This relatability can help content creators to grow a loyal following. UK creator Emanuel Wallace, better known as Big Manny (@big.manny1), says that relatability, as well as authenticity, have been fundamental to his work. In his efforts to make chemistry and other science topics fun and accessible to young people, he has gained more than two million TikTok followers — and has made videos on the platform with Prince William and with Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown.

His videos show him doing science demonstrations ranging from standard classroom ones — what happens when you burn magnesium — to those requiring sophisticated set-ups and equipment. One video shows a chicken breast being exposed to the insides of a lithium battery. “This chicken breast represents you,” he says, before it bursts into flames. It’s a powerful warning about the dangers of swallowing a lithium battery.

His expertise as a former secondary-school science technician comes through, even with his casual approach: “I don’t really look like a typical scientist. I don’t wear a lab coat. Sometimes I might have a tracksuit on. And I use colloquial terms in my speech,” he says. “I just be myself.”

Quashing misinformation

When it comes to fighting misinformation, content creators take various approaches. Clark favours “pre-bunking” rather than debunking, which he finds less effective. He tries to reach a broad audience with solid facts that leave no room for ambiguity: “This is like vaccinating them against misinformation”.

Others have gained a reputation for challenging misinformation head-on. Russian–American creator Mikhail Varshavski, better known online as Doctor Mike (@doctormike), spends half of his week as a family-medicine physician and the other half creating content for his 14.6 million YouTube, 5.3 million Instagram and 2.7 million TikTok followers. He aims his content not just at people who agree with him, but also at those who haven’t thought much about their health care, who have been hurt by the system or even who disagree with modern medicine.

One of the sources Varshavski fact-checks is Robert F. Kennedy Jr, head of the US Department of Health and Human Services. One of Doctor Mike’s YouTube videos, titled ‘Doctor Reacts To RFK Jr.’s Health Claims’, has more than three million views and 29,000 comments, including from viewers thanking him for speaking up on the topic and saying that they have contacted their congressional representative as a result.

“When someone in a very high-ranking position like Secretary Kennedy tweets something that is obviously scientifically inaccurate, wrong, no question about it, he gets 10 million views on that post. And when the American Medical Association tries to fact-check it with their own tweet, they get 10 likes,” Varshavski says. It has become a lot easier, he says, to spread misinformation on social media than to counteract it. “I hope to fill that void by putting out as much content as possible on a weekly basis,” he adds.

In the past year, Varshavski has appeared twice on the Surrounded debate series on YouTube from Jubilee Media. With the intensity of a reality competition show, it tends to provoke heated disagreements and emotional reactions. In one episode, he took on 20 vaccine sceptics, and in another, 20 Kennedy supporters. Varshavski describes the experience as extremely stressful, but also “the perfect way to get in front of people who perhaps otherwise wouldn’t be part of this conversation.”

One of the big challenges in fighting misinformation on social media is echo chambers, in which people are served and interact mostly with content that reaffirms their existing beliefs. Going outside those chambers, to interact directly with critics, can lead to trolling, doxxing and other online harassment, which can come with serious consequences for a person’s well-being and career.

Content creators must be aware of potential backlash, says Adam Levy, an atmospheric physicist based in Berlin and London who makes climate-change videos as ClimateAdam (@climate_adam) on YouTube and Instagram. (Levy has also worked for Nature.) Levy has received a lot of positive comments about their videos — including from people who say they plan to study environmental science or have changed how they vote because of the content — but also a lot of criticism. “It ranges from people who deny basic scientific evidence to personal attacks based on how people perceive me or the assumptions they make about me,” they say.

Seeking support

In the past few years, Clark has scaled up his content creation. He now works with a producer on his TikTok content, who assists in researching, writing and editing the videos. But finding money to support the work has been difficult.

“If you’re an individual creator, cash flow is a real problem,” he says. His income comes from a mixture of advertising revenue from YouTube videos, paid support from his viewers through the monetization platform Patreon, some philanthropic funding and sponsorship from brands. He’s had sponsorships with the website-development brand Squarespace, headquartered in New York City, and the Met Office, the UK national climate and weather service. He’d prefer not to do sponsorships: “Creator capitalism is something I feel a bit icky about,” he says. But he needs them to pay for the work that goes into his videos.

Nature 650, 542-544 (2026)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00472-5

Cover photo:  Video images courtesy of (clockwise from top left): Adam Levy, DM Operations,Simon Clark and The Gut Health Doctor. Hands: Ulyana Moskalchuk/iStock via Getty