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“They’re being marketed to young men by influencers who are deliberately saying, ‘If you want to be like Captain America, you’ve got to take these drugs,’” CCDH founder and CEO Imran Ahmed said. TikTok spokesperson Ben Rathe criticized the report, saying the group’s methodology doesn’t distinguish between harmful videos and positive content that talks about recovery from steroids or their side effects.
The information for the report came from TikTok’s publicly available Creative Center tool. Researchers were unable to measure how many times users under 18 came across such content since the company does not provide that information. Ahmed said in an interview that his group has asked TikTok to make that type of data available for assessment.