French Medical Council Sets Standards for Doctor-Influencers

The French National Council of the Order of Physicians (CNOM) and YouTube have joined forces to establish a charter for doctors who create content online.

In a recent announcement, François Arnault, president of the CNOM and an experienced ENT specialist, unveiled a new set of ten principles aimed at regulating the activities of physicians producing digital content.

As social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok see increasing engagement from healthcare professionals, this charter aims to balance innovation with responsibility, ensuring that medical content remains trustworthy and evidence-based.

“New modes of communication offer physicians the opportunity to reach millions of people,” noted Arnault.“This transformation presents both an opportunity and a challenge as the general public often navigates an environment where misinformation proliferates.”

Ethical Standards

Doctors’ public statements, whether through traditional media or social networks, are regulated by the code of ethics. This code mandates that doctors participating in public discourse communicate the information with caution and restraint, adhere to ethical obligations, and refrain from presenting unverified hypotheses as established facts.

However, given the unique nature of social media and content creation, CNOM sought to develop a dedicated charter.

These new rules were created in collaboration with YouTube, although they are intended to apply across all social media platforms. Several healthcare professionals who are already active on these platforms also contributed to their creation.

“This ethical framework will guide doctors with an online presence to provide rigorous medical information that is accessible to all. It is a way to combat misinformation and contributes to our public health efforts,” said Audrey Perret, MBBCh BAO, MMed, who drafted the charter and runs a dermatology and aesthetic medicine YouTube channel with 87,000 subscribers.

Charter Guidelines

The 10 principles of the charter aim to improve the identification of credible medical content on social media and prevent misrepresentation by encouraging doctors who create content to use their professional title.

The charter also reinforces existing regulations prohibiting:

• Personalized medical advice given to subscribers
• Paid promotion to boost content visibility
• Self-promotion of a doctor’s own medical practice
• Endorsement of health products for commercial gain

Given the growing concern over medical misinformation, the charter emphasizes the importance of high-quality, evidence-based content from medical professionals.

Physicians are urged to produce content with clear sources, dates, and regular updates while avoiding the promotion of unverified medical practices or therapies.

“This charter is a call for collective mobilization,” said Arnault. “Our goal is for as many doctors creating content as possible to adopt it, and we hope that it will spark a collective awareness, among both social media platforms and physicians, reinforcing the need for scientific integrity in communication to protect public health.”

The charter will be distributed in medical schools, where future doctor-influencers are most likely to emerge.

This initiative is part of a larger effort to regulate medical content on social media. In 2023, the French ‘Influencers Act’ banned advertising for cosmetic surgery and certain other practices. In the same year, YouTube introduced a certification system for content created by healthcare institutions and professionals.

This story was translated fromJIM using several editorial tools, including AI, as part of the process. Human editors reviewed this content before publication.