Users who search for “beach”,“sunburn’,“summer sun” and similar hashtags will also see a pop-up banner for an anti-tanning campaign. The “Tanning. It’s Cooked” campaign will highlight that Australia has the highest incidence of melanoma in the world.
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TikTok has launched the campaign after the joint medical director of Melanoma Institute Australia,Professor Georgina Long,slammed social media and television for normalising,glamorising and trivialising tanning and sunburn.
Speaking at the National Press Club in September,she said a “sunburnt tanlines” hashtag on TikTok had more than 200 million views,largely teens and young adults showing off their red raw burns.
Long urged media,advertisers and influencers to “change the cultural narrative around sunburn and tanning”.
The institute projects that melanoma will kill 16,000 people,leave 350,000 living with the disease and cost the nation $8.7 billion by 2030 unless action is taken quickly.
The general manager of TikTok in Australia and New Zealand,Lee Hunter,said the company would assess videos featuring tanning and take down those that contravened its community guidelines.