Systematic Literature Review on the Spread of Health-related Misinformation on Social Media

By Yuxi Wang, Martin McKee, A. Torbica, D. Stuckler. 2019

1,457 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Contemporary commentators describe the current period as “an era of fake news” in which misinformation, generated intentionally or unintentionally, spreads rapidly. Although affecting all areas of life, it poses particular problems in the health arena, where it can delay or prevent effective care, in some cases threatening the lives of individuals. While examples of the rapid spread of misinformation date back to the earliest days of scientific medicine, the internet, by allowing instantaneous communication and powerful amplification has brought about a quantum change. In democracies where ideas compete in the marketplace for attention, accurate scientific information, which may be difficult to comprehend and even dull, is easily crowded out by sensationalized news. In order to uncover the current evidence and better understand the mechanism of misinformation spread, we report a systematic review of the nature and potential drivers of health-related misinformation. We searched PubMed, Cochrane, Web of Science, Scopus and Google databases to identify relevant methodological and empirical articles published between 2012 and 2018. A total of 57 articles were included for full-text analysis. Overall, we observe an increasing trend in published articles on health-related misinformation and the role of social media in its propagation. The most extensively studied topics involving misinformation relate to vaccination, Ebola and Zika Virus, although others, such as nutrition, cancer, fluoridation of water and smoking also featured. Studies adopted theoretical frameworks from psychology and network science, while co-citation analysis revealed potential for greater collaboration across fields. Most studies employed content analysis, social network analysis or experiments, drawing on disparate disciplinary paradigms. Future research should examine susceptibility of different sociodemographic groups to misinformation and understand the role of belief systems on the intention to spread misinformation. Further interdisciplinary research is also warranted to identify effective and tailored interventions to counter the spread of health-related misinformation online.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Health, Sociology and Political Science

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Citations in the corpus

Fake news, disinformation and misinformation in social media: a review (2023, background): “…among users, content similarity, stance, sentiment score, headline, named entity, news sharing, credibility history, tweet comments SHPT, PolitiFact Wang et al. (2019a) The source of the news, its headline, its author, its publication time, the adherence of a news source to a particular party,…”
Effects of COVID-19 Misinformation on Information Seeking, Avoidance, and Processing: A Multicountry Comparative Study (2020, background): “There is limited understanding of why certain individuals or societies are more or less vulnerable to misinformation (Wang et al., 2019).”
Student Attitudes Towards Online Education during the COVID-19 Viral Outbreak of 2020: Distance Learning in a Time of Social Distance (2020, background): “…bias in social media and research has found some bias in social media reporting (Lin et al., 2011), particularly on misinformation on medical health portrayed by social media (Wang et al., 2019), traditional media may still be preferred as a source for standard news (Ardevol-Abreu & Zuniga, 2016).”
Prevalence of Health Misinformation on Social Media: Systematic Review (2021, background): “Some of our findings are in line with those obtained in recent works [16].”
Evaluating the Impact of Attempts to Correct Health Misinformation on Social Media: A Meta-Analysis (2020, background): “Beyond confusion and reduced trust in health professionals, unfiltered exposure to misinformation can “delay or prevent effective care, in some cases threatening the lives of individuals” (Y. Wang et al., 2019, p. 1).”
The changes in the effects of social media use of Cypriots due to COVID-19 pandemic (2020, neutral): “Recently [25], inform that there was an extensive circulation of misinformation related to health on social media.”
The Psychology of Fake News. (2021, background): “Understanding the psychology that underpins the dynamics of social media sharing is an important emerging subfield in psychology [21,67,112] (in addition to other areas such as computer science [76], political science [113], communication [114], and public health [115], among others [116]), driven i”
Multidisciplinary research priorities for the COVID-19 pandemic: a call for action for mental health science (2020, background): “79 Social media can be a source of rapidly disseminated misinformation, 80 amplifying perceptions of risk.”
Effects of misinformation on COVID-19 individual responses and recommendations for resilience of disastrous consequences of misinformation (2020, neutral): “Information credibility is comparatively well comprehended in the case of traditional media, but social media pose challenges in evaluating the source credibility since social media consumers themselves are publishers [75] i.”
Health-protective behaviour, social media usage and conspiracy belief during the COVID-19 public health emergency (2020, positive): “But while social media misinformation is both pervasive and popular, its effects are hard to quantify, and it is unclear which groups are most susceptible to its influence (Wang, McKee, Torbica, & Stuckler, 2019).”