Stitch, duet, reply: are TikTok’s interactive features making science more participatory?

The short version

Only about 4% of science videos on TikTok used stitch, duet, or reply-to. But when creators did use them, scientists and influencers led the way, often to debunk misinformation. Pseudoscience used them too, and those videos got shared more.

What we did

On TikTok, you don’t just post a video; you can talk back to someone else’s. Stitch lets you open your video with a clip from another one, duet puts your video side by side with someone else’s, and reply-to turns a comment into a brand-new video. In theory, these features could make science communication a two-way (or many-way) conversation instead of experts talking at the public. But do they actually?

We gathered every U.S. TikTok video tagged #science from 2024 (over 115,000), filtered them down to about 34,000 that were actually about science, and compared 1,319 videos that used stitch, duet, or reply-to with 1,477 randomly picked videos that didn’t. Then we trained AI models to examine all 2,796 videos: more than 31,000 image frames, every audio track, and every transcript. We checked the AI’s work against trained human coders. For each video, we looked at who made it, what it was trying to do, how it looked and sounded, and how many views, likes, comments, and shares it got.

What we found

• Interactive science videos are rare. Only about 4% of science videos used stitch, duet, or reply-to. Most were replies to comments.
• Scientists and influencers led the conversation. Scientists and influencers made about two-thirds of the interactive videos, while ordinary users made more than half of the non-interactive ones.
• Interactive videos were the go-to for fighting misinformation. About 1 in 4 interactive videos aimed to debunk false claims, compared with about 1 in 25 non-interactive videos.
• They were more personal, too. Most interactive videos (86%) featured someone talking straight to the camera, compared with 42% of other science videos.
• We found four styles:
  • scientists explaining science in response to questions (by far the most common)
  • everyday users sharing personal takes on science
  • influencers turning science into entertaining experiments, like growing a bismuth crystal on request
  • everyday users explaining science with diagrams and visuals
• Engagement was a mixed bag. Debunking videos drew more views, likes, and comments than purely informational ones, and influencers got more likes and comments than scientists. But pseudoscience and conspiracy videos got shared more than informational ones. And while music-only videos did well, talking over background music was linked to less engagement.

Why it matters

TikTok’s interactive features can make science feel like a conversation: scientists answering real questions on camera, creators debunking myths, everyday people weighing in. But few creators use them, and the same openness that lets experts correct misinformation also gives pseudoscience a stage. For science communicators, the takeaways are practical: answering audience questions directly, showing your face, and using visuals can pay off, but you might want to skip the background music when you’re talking. For researchers, we also offer a validated AI-powered framework for studying short videos at scale.

Cite the paper

Li, Y., Zhang, A. L., & Lu, H. (2026). Stitching, dueting, and playing with science on TikTok: An AI-powered multimodal approach to understanding interactive science videos and audience engagement. Computational Communication Research, 8(4), 1–29. https://doi.org/10.5117/CCR2026.4.2.LI

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