Social media's role in promoting oral health and altering behavior in Saudi Arabia: systematic review

Social media has emerged as a structurally transformative force in health communication, reshaping not only how oral health information is accessed but also how individuals form health beliefs, evaluate care options, and engage with dental services.In Saudi Arabia, where digital penetration is exceptionally high and a youthful demographic drives platform adoption, these dynamics carry particular significance for oral health promotion and healthcare utilization.This systematic review moves beyond descriptive aggregation to propose and evaluate an integrative interpretive framework-the Social Media Health Behavior Pathway Model (SMHBPM)-that conceptualizes social media exposure as restructuring health behavior through 4 sequential mechanisms: knowledge acquisition, awareness formation, perceptual recalibration (encompassing trust, accessibility, and credibility), and behavioral enactment (including preventive practices and service utilization).A comprehensive literature search across Google Scholar and PubMed identified 4,750 studies, of which 27 met inclusion criteria.The Joanna Briggs Institute critical appraisal tool guided bias assessment.Interpreted through the SMHBPM, evidence consistently demonstrated that social media accelerated oral health knowledge gains, particularly among women and younger populations, while visual platforms such as Instagram and TikTok functioned as structural mediators that reconfigured provider selection and esthetic treatment decisions.Educational interventions via WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Facebook produced measurable shifts in preventive behavior and care-seeking norms.However, effects were moderated by platform type, content credibility, digital literacy, and sociodemographic context, revealing that social media does not uniformly empower health behavior but differentially restructures it across population segments.Most studies carried moderate risk of bias, constraining causal inference.This framework-driven synthesis advances understanding of how social media operates as a systemic mechanism of health behavior change rather than a passive information channel, and offers an actionable conceptual foundation for designing targeted oral health interventions in digitally saturated contexts such as Saudi Arabia.