With the aid of the social media ecosystem, the dissemination of erroneous or deceptive health information has increased over the past 20 years and has recently been brought to light by the COVID-19 epidemic.
Although many of the repercussions of disinformation are instantly obvious, it also bears the risk of more subtle consequences. With this in mind, and as more and more people turn to the internet for health information, individuals involved in public health investigation, policy, and practice must take greater effort to combat misinformation.
This collection requests papers that seek to, but are not limited to:
- Analyze the frequency and trends of health myths.
- Recognize the interaction methods and elements that enable the propagation of health-related disinformation on social media.
- Analyze how social media platforms affect the spread of false information about health and the emergence and spread of unhealthy or risky behaviors.
- Determine which tactics will help combat and lessen the harm caused by health misinformation.
- Analyze how people respond to health-related disinformation online.
- Recognize the psychological factors that contribute to information susceptibility.
- Examine the traits of groups that are susceptible to false information.
- Recognize the ways in which inaccurate information heightens cyberchondria and other mental illness issues.
- Recognize false information regarding health crises worldwide.
- Examine how erroneous research affects governmental decisions.
- Recognize how health investigation and policy can be used to reduce the damage caused by misinformation.
- Provide dependable and public needs and high-quality information to meet policy by putting forth approaches, tools, and innovations in knowledge translation.
It might be difficult to respond to false information for a variety of reasons. Psychological elements like cognitive biases and emotions may render practical attempts to combat disinformation by providing factual information useless. The article claims that this may be the reason why remedies like encouraging articles with correcting information have had mixed results.
Prevalence of Health Misinformation on Social Media: Systematic Review focused on examining the prevalence of health misinformation in social media and searched MEDLINE, Pub Med, Web of Science, and Scopus for articles published in English before March 2019. whole of 69 studies were determined to be appropriate, covering everything from social media platforms to health.
Studies including medications and smoking products have the highest prevalence of health misconceptions. Several studies found that 87 percent of posts contained false material. The human papilloma-virus vaccine was the one most frequently associated with health misinformation (43%), which was also highly widespread. Compared to the aforementioned subjects, diet-related health misinformation and arguments in favor of eating disorders were more prevalent (36 percent). Research that was specifically devoted to diseases (such as pandemics and noncommunicable diseases) also revealed a moderate misconception rate (40%)—especially among patients with cancer. Last but not least, medical therapies accounted for the lowest percentages of health misinformation (30 percent).
The most common places to find health misinformation were on Twitter and in discussions of medications and smoking-related products. Nevertheless, there was also a lot of false information about important public health issues, like diseases and vaccines.
Ways to combat false information.
According to the paper in the “American Public Health Association,” a strategy that just focuses on dispelling myths or disseminating evidence-based health messaging will probably fall short. To create new tactics and decide when, how, and where to respond to false information, an interdisciplinary study is required.
Although a reactionary response will work in one circumstance, a proactive response (like vaccination) may be essential in another. It’s also feasible that the optimum course of action is to take no action at all, for instance, if correcting the error will just “give it oxygen” and encourage its spread.
Moreover, focused strategies are required to provide correcting information to those who are misinformed. In order to offer people evidence-based information, point them to reliable sources, or deliver counter-messaging, healthcare, and public health practitioner providers may try to identify and break down information silos online where misinformation is rife.
Moreover, systemic preventive measures are required, such as legislation forcing social media to remove potentially damaging disinformation or incentives to encourage them to implement policies that make it more challenging for users to find and spread misinformation. Another crucial prevention tactic is to raise public awareness of science, health, and media to lessen the public’s susceptibility to false information.
In order to encourage a healthy skepticism towards claims that are overly simplistic or sensational, such initiatives could increase public awareness of the techniques (for instance, cherry-picking data) used by disinformation agents and increase the public’s understanding of the inherent apprehension and intricacy of health and science data.