POV: Health Misinformation Is Rampant on Social Media – Boston University

The global anti-vaccine movement and vaccine hesitancy that accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic show no signs of abating.

According to a survey of US adults, Americans in October 2023 were less likely to view approved vaccines as safe than they were in April 2021. As vaccine confidence falls, health misinformation continues to spread like wildfire on social media and in real life.

I am a public health expert in health misinformation, science communication, and health behavior change. In my view, we cannot underestimate the dangers of health misinformation and the need to understand why it spreads and what we can do about it. Health misinformation is defined as any health-related claim that is false based on current scientific consensus.

Vaccines are the number one topic of misleading health claims. Some common myths about vaccines include:

Beliefs in such myths have come at the highest cost.

An estimated 319,000 COVID-19 deaths that occurred between January 2021 and April 2022 in the United States could have been prevented if those individuals had been vaccinated, according to a data dashboard from the Brown University School of Public Health. Misinformation and disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines alone have cost the US economy an estimated US$50 million to $300 million per day in direct costs from hospitalizations, long-term illness, lives lost, and economic losses from missed work.

Though vaccine myths and misunderstandings tend to dominate conversations about health, there is an abundance of misinformation on social media surrounding diets and eating disorders, smoking or substance use, chronic diseases, and medical treatments.

My teams research and that of others shows that social media platforms have become go-to sources for health information, especially among adolescents and young adults. However, many people are not equipped to maneuver the maze of health misinformation.

For example, an analysis of Instagram and TikTok posts from 2022 to 2023 by the Washington Post and the nonprofit news site The Examination found that the food, beverage, and dietary supplement industries paid dozens of registered dietitian influencers to post content promoting diet soda, sugar, and supplements, reaching millions of viewers. The dietitians relationships with the food industry were not always made clear to viewers.

Studies show that health misinformation spread on social media results in fewer people getting vaccinated and can also increase the risk of other health dangers such as disordered eating and unsafe sex practices and sexually transmitted infections. Health misinformation has even bled over into animal health, with a 2023 study finding that 53 percent of dog owners surveyed in a nationally representative sample report being skeptical of pet vaccines.

One major reason behind the spread of health misinformation is declining trust in science and government. Rising political polarization, coupled with historical medical mistrust among communities that have experienced and continue to experience unequal health care treatment, exacerbates preexisting divides.

The lack of trust is both fueled and reinforced by the way misinformation can spread today. Social media platforms allow people to form information silos with ease; you can curate your networks and your feed by unfollowing or muting contradictory views from your own and liking and sharing content that aligns with your existing beliefs and value systems.

By tailoring content based on past interactions, social media algorithms can unintentionally limit your exposure to diverse perspectives and generate a fragmented and incomplete understanding of information. Even more concerning, a study of misinformation spread on Twitter analyzing data from 2006 to 2017 found that falsehoods were 70 percent more likely to be shared than the truth and spread further, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth across all categories of information.

The average kindergarten student sees about 70 media messages every day. By the time theyre in high school, teens spend more than a third of their day using media.

The lack of robust and standardized regulation of misinformation content on social media places the difficult task of discerning what is true or false information on individual users. We scientists and research entities can also do better in communicating our science and rebuilding trust, as my colleague and I have previously written. I also provide peer-reviewed recommendations for the important roles that parents/caregivers, policymakers, and social media companies can play.

Below are some steps that consumers can take to identify and prevent health misinformation spread:

All of us can play a part in responsibly consuming and sharing information so that the spread of the truth outpaces the false.

Monica Wang is an associate professor of community health sciences at the School of Public Health; she can be reached at mlwang@bu.edu.

This column originally appeared on The Conversation.POV is an opinion page that provides timely commentaries from students, faculty, and staff on a variety of issues: on-campus, local, state, national, or international. Anyone interested in submitting a piece, which should be about 700 words long, should contact John ORourke at orourkej@bu.edu. BU Today reserves the right to reject or edit submissions. The views expressed are solely those of the author and are not intended to represent the views of Boston University.

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POV: Health Misinformation Is Rampant on Social Media - Boston University