For more than 30 years, the internet has been a primary source of information. But that doesn’t always mean the information is accurate.
Studies show that 43 percent of young adults under 30 regularly get their news from TikTok. Research also shows that when it comes to health information, young people face inaccurate, false, or incomplete information online.
Limited or inconsistent sex education in schools adds to the confusion. In the United States, access to sex ed depends on where a student lives—and even when it’s offered, it’s not always accurate.
Only 37 percent of U.S. states require sexual education in schools to be medically accurate, according to Boston University.
To learn how health educators can better connect young people to trusted information, Public Good News spoke with Heather Corinna, a sex educator, author, and founder of Scarleteen. The nonprofit provides inclusive, fact-checked sex and relationship education for teens and young adults.
Corinna reflected on nearly 30 years of sex education and shared what community health workers and journalists can learn from it.
Here’s what they said.
[Editor’s note: The contents of this interview have been edited for length and clarity.]
Public Good News: How did you start doing this kind of work? Can you explain how your platform decides what information to share?
Heather Corinna: You know, it’s funny. I kind of came into this [work] from a few different channels.
My dad was a pretty hardcore activist, political activist. My mom worked in health and public health. I think I’m what you get when you put my parents in a blender.
I [started Scarleteen] while I was still a Montessori teacher, [which I love] because it is learner directed. You know, you decide in a Montessori classroom what you’re going to teach a child based on what they’re really interested in and what they’re asking you for.
So at Scarleteen, we have a message board, a scheduled live chat, and a text line. We look at our traffic to see what people are looking at, and comments that we might get in social media.
That’s how we decide what content we have, right?
You know, the funding that we have is minimal, but still, none of it has any say or agenda in what information we provide. It all is supportive of the fact that we decide what to publish based on what young people are asking us for.
Sometimes that ask is literally in the form of a question. Other times, we’ll be working with young people in direct services, and we’ll just kind of see patterns.
PGN: What patterns or trends have you seen?
H.C.: The audience that we get seems particularly international. We’re still very much seeing a lot of the reverberations from the initial wave of COVID-19 and from lockdown.
We’re seeing a lot of people who are—in terms of what we know have been historical trends—or feel like they’re starting everything late. [They feel] like they don’t have the kind of practice in social relationships or, you know, sexual partnerships that they might have had if they weren’t out of school for a handful of years in lockdown.
Then, of course, all of the things that are still happening. COVID-19 and lockdown inserted an extra fear of other people. And, I think at the same time we’re living in a time of such increased racism and xenophobia.
It’s just a perfect storm, really. So, I think we’re definitely seeing a lot from social isolation.
It’s also really common to be in relationships that not only started online or in some kind of digital medium, but are still online.
We run into people that will be in a partnership of two or three years, that they’ve never met in person. But, you know, it’s real.
They talk every day. That person is a real person. They’re a real person.
But it’s, obviously, it’s really complicated to figure out how to navigate those kinds of relationships and how to think about pulling them into the real world.
PGN: Apart from the recent trends you’ve noticed, what are some sexual health topics or issues that young people have always cared about or dealt with?
H.C.: Scarleteen will be 27 in a couple of months. One of the things that has been an absolute constant the whole time, is you know, people have been terrified about becoming pregnant from things that are just not likely to get them pregnant.
Or, you know, you have the opposite, where you have people who are taking giant risks of pregnancy, but they don’t know that they’re taking giant risks because they don’t understand either when they need to use contraception or how to use the contraception.
We just had somebody the other day that came in: They’re on the birth control pill, but some days they take it, and some days they don’t take it.
But if you asked them, you know, if a doctor said, ‘Are you using any method of contraception?’ they would say, ‘Yes, I’m on the pill.’
And if the doctor didn’t ask enough other questions, they would just presume that they’re fine.
But of course, the way that they were explaining it, we had to say, ‘No, you’re not actually on the pill,’ you know?
PGN: Studies show more and more young people are turning to social media to get their news and answer their health questions. From your experience sharing health information online, what have you learned about ways to help young people find trustworthy health facts on the internet?
H.C.: I mean, it doesn’t have to be this way, but because of the way that most social media platforms are built, everything is in the tiniest crumb, right?
Tiktok videos are short. Instagram posts don’t let you link somewhere else.
And what happens even when it’s not outright misinformation—and that happens a lot—but everything is so truncated that it requires that people already come to it with a knowledge base.
Let’s say that we wanted to make a post and talk about how we determine who’s a safe sexual partner for us. Even if I put in a sentence in there that says you need to trust them, that assumes that the person reading it knows what that means.
What’s trust? How do you build it? How do you nurture it? How do you make sure that somebody is trustworthy?
If you don’t know all of that, telling someone you need to trust them is not useful.
One of the tricky things that we’ve always run into at Scarleteen is adults, who say, like, ‘Oh, young people won’t read these whole long articles’ that we write.
First of all, they seem to. Because it’s some of the only actually in-depth information that’s out there.
If we’re given more information than we need, most of us learn the skills over time to look for and pull out the information that we need from it.
PGN: What do you wish for other health workers that are either working with young people or providing outreach around sexual health?
H.C.: For a lot of people, we don’t get lessons in school on how to do health research. People use Google, like people used to use the Merck manual right in the 60s, and the 70s, and the 80s, where they’ll just put something in and they trust anything that comes up and again.
Now, you’re not even getting to a website. Half the time, you’re just getting the AI summary of what it is, which is even less reliable.
So, I think that sometimes it’s taking the pressure off that you have to know the answer. I think having a discussion is just as valuable as knowing the answer, right?
We tell our volunteers a lot of times, when people first come in, almost always, no one is giving us as much information as we actually need to answer their questions.
So when you go to answer their question, if there’s anything in your brain that says, ‘Well, I wish I knew this,’ don’t keep moving forward. Go back and ask questions.
Asking [clarifying] questions is a really big deal.
Then, I think about establishing a relationship so that, again, maybe you need some time to do a little extra research to make sure that you’re really answering the question, especially for that person.
Like, there’s no one size fits all when it comes to bodies.
One of the biggest things that Scarleteen has always done is that we take medical language and we make it plain language.
So many times, especially in a doctor’s office, they say stuff to you and you’re nodding like you know what they’re saying. But you don’t know what they’re saying because they’re saying it the way that a doctor talks to another doctor instead of the way that somebody should talk to a patient who didn’t go to medical school, you know?
We need to make sure that what we’re telling them makes sense to them and is actually useful.