New Report from Women’s Group Reveals Dangerous GLP-1 Gray Market on TikTok

For Immediate Release: July 27, 2026

Contact: media@fwdshift.com

UltraViolet, a leading national women-led gender-justice organization that has fought to make TikTok a safer place for women and survivors, issued the following statement announcing the publication of their new national report: Unregulated, Unmoderated, and Unsafe: The GLP-1 Gray Market on TikTok. The report reveals the full scope of TikTok’s role in not just hosting, but contributing to an illicit market for GLP-1 medications that continues to put the health of users, especially women, at risk of physical, mental, and financial harm.

“In failing to moderate this fast-growing and dangerous GLP-1 gray market, TikTok is effectively choosing to put its nearly 2 billion users at risk—particularly women and girls who are being disproportionately targeted with this content,” said UltraViolet Campaign Director Jenna Sherman. “The inaction sends a message that TikTok is willing to ignore even its own Community Guidelines if it means turning a profit.”

GLP-1 medications—best known by brand names like Ozempic and Wegovy—have been hailed as breakthrough treatments for diabetes and obesity. But for many American women, the promise of these drugs does not match the reality of trying to obtain them.

That’s where gray markets have stepped in and exactly where TikTok, valued at hundreds of billions of dollars, has failed to protect its users, especially women. As the new report details, sellers on the platform have been allowed to create a ‘Wild West’ in which women Tiktok users are disproportionately targeted by sexualized imagery and gendered messaging promoting cheaper, easy-to-buy, and unregulated GLP-1 alternatives advertised as “research-grade” and marketed as safe for human use—all this despite TikTok’s own regulations banning the promotion of high-risk substances that should be regulated by governing bodies and taken with medical oversight. Much of the content flagged by researchers included specific instructions on compounding, dosing, and injecting gray market drugs at home.

“Women in this country find themselves caught between two powerful forces: a broken health care system that makes medical care difficult to access, and a culture that relentlessly tells them that their health and value are tied to the size of their bodies,” continued Sherman. “These pressures are squeezing us, leaving so many women and girls vulnerable to unregulated gray market vendors on TikTok who are exploiting our precise vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, it is not a niche phenomenon. If you are a woman on TikTok, especially if you’re middle-aged, it’s likely you have seen this kind of content.”

Despite the scale and human cost of this gray market, those in power continue to do little to protect vulnerable women. As the report shows, these widespread scams were prevalent on TikTok before the platform’s forced sale in January 2026 from China’s ByteDance to a new set of primarily U.S.-based entities, and has continued to persist after (this finding is especially ironic given that national security and public health concerns are what ostensibly led the Trump administration to demand an ownership change in the first place). More than six months later, though, little has changed: GLP-1 dupes and related scams—many of which stem from accounts claiming to be based in China—remain rampant on the platform. Indeed, the entirety of the administration’s interest in taking over TikTok and stacking it with political allies seems aimed not at protecting the American public, but at expanding their political influence and filling their own pockets with billions.

“We’ve seen this movie before: Tech oligarchs gain control of huge swaths of the internet and shape the content and ads we see for their own political and financial gain at the cost of user safety and the public good,” continued Sherman. “The twist this time is that we are in an unprecedented age of sophisticated algorithms, groundbreaking weight-loss medications, and unhealthy weight loss obsession. Altogether, it’s a disaster.”

In light of these and other failures by TikTok to protect women users, UltraViolet is now demanding greater accountability from the platform. The report’s authors recommend that TikTok:

• Enforce existing policies, which would include suspending and removing accounts promoting illicit GLP-1 sales.
• Disable search suggestions and discover pages that surface violations of TikTok’s policies (eg, “Gray Market Peptide Pricing” or hashtags like “graymarketpeptides”).
• Roll back sections of the TikTok Community Guidelines update from September 2025 to retain the explicit prohibitions on black and gray markets and redirection to offsite locations and/or direct messaging.
• Provide full transparency on enforcement actions taken in response to user reports in the U.S., comparable to what is done in the EU for the Digital Services Act.
• Expand the Creator Code of Conduct to include specific and clear details about the prohibitions in their terms that relate to the marketing of illicit drugs.

“We’re calling on TikTok company leadership to take urgent action: Stop the GLP-1 gray market, protect women users, and hold accountable dangerous bad actors. TikTok users deserve a social media platform that supports their health, safety, and autonomy—not one that exploits their vulnerabilities and health for profit,” concluded Sherman.

Victoria Schmidt, a victim of a GLP-1 scam on TikTok, knows all too well the harms that can come from this gray market and is now ready to tell her story. Unable to take traditional GLP-1s due to a medical condition, Schmidt became interested in GLP-1 patches after seeing promotions on TikTok. It seemed like an easy and straightforward solution—until her package arrived and the drugs were soon revealed to be fake.  “You would think TikTok would give warnings or look into a product before putting it in front of millions or billions of people to be taken advantage of,” stated Schmidt. “I was able to notice it was a scam and demand a refund, but that might not be everyone’s reality.”

Schmidt, like many TikTok users, put their trust in the platform only to realize how few guardrails and protections are really in place, especially when it comes to AI-powered scams: “It’s good we have more medical options, and as a society, we can make our own decisions, but they need to be informed decisions,” explained Schmidt. “But at this point we think something is informed if we see it on TikTok because we assume it must be real. That’s not an informed decision — that’s marketing. Then you add AI into it where you can literally take photos from a real product and tell AI to make a knockoff ad and even include an interview with a fake person saying how great the product is. It’s concerning. These companies have to do more to protect users.”

UltraViolet has been a leading voice in the movement to make social media and digital spaces safer for women and gender-expansive people. The organization has launched campaigns against Meta hate speech rollbacks, pressured TikTok to remove ads promoting the use of GPS trackers for stalking, and raised alarms about emerging technologies that can facilitate abuse—including nonconsensual sexual deepfakes made with AI and wearable surveillance technologies such as Meta’s smart glasses, all while fighting to ensure that these platforms are safe and welcoming for all.

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weareultraviolet.org

UltraViolet Education Fund is a women-led gender justice 501c3 organization, with an online community of more than 1 million members nationwide. We combine organizing, technology, creative campaigning, and people power to win real-world changes for women and gender expansive people.