Fear Doesn't Go Viral, It Lingers: Spread, Affect, and Discourse of Food-Fear Content on TikTok

Overview & Synopsis

TikTok has become a primary channel for nutrition information, and alongside evidence-based content, it hosts a growing stream of \emph{fear-based} wellness messaging that frames ordinary foods as ``toxic,'' ``poison,'' or things to ``never eat.'' Prior work has extensively studied political and public-health misinformation and audited the accuracy of health videos, but to the best of our knowledge, no work has examined how everyday food-fear content spreads and how audiences respond to it. To investigate this, we collected 97,234 TikTok food and nutrition videos, labeled them \textit{Fear} or \textit{Non-Fear} with a zero-shot multimodal classifier built on Gemini~3 Flash that is validated against human consensus (Cohen's $κ=0.81$), and analyzed more than 1.1M comments and 272K parent-reply pairs. Contrary to the intuition that fear ``goes viral,'' fear videos reach fewer people than non-fear videos. Their distinctive signature lies in dynamics: they are shared more per view (1.7--2.1$\times$ after controls) and their discussion persists longer (comment half-life 1.62$\times$ after controls). These shifts are modest in size but hold after controlling for reach. Comments on fear videos are more negative, angrier, and more disgusted, yet negativity is \emph{not} more self-reinforcing: negative comments draw negative replies at the same rate as in non-fear threads, while positive comments are far less likely to stay positive. Fear threads are contested rather than one-sided, with both more corrective and more alarm-amplifying replies. Fear discourse concentrates in frames about industrial ingredients, contaminants, and institutional distrust, and its repertoire of frames widens over 2020--2026. Our results argue for persistence-based rather than virality-based signals when platforms seek harmful health content.