Addressing Health-Related Misinformation on Social Media.

By Wen-Ying Sylvia Chou, A. Oh, William M. P. Klein. Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), 2018

778 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The ubiquitous social media landscape has created an information ecosystem populated by a cacophony of opinion, true and false information, and an unprecedented quantity of data on many topics. Policy makers and the social media industry grapple with the challenge of curbing fake news, disinformation, and hate speech; and the field of medicine is similarly confronted with the spread of false, inaccurate, or incomplete health information.1 From the discourse on the latest tobacco products, alcohol, and alternative therapies to skepticism about medical guidelines, misinformation on social media can have adverse effects on public health. For example, the social media rumors circulating during the Ebola outbreak in 2014 created hostility toward health workers, posing challenges to efforts to control the epidemic.2 Another example is the increasingly prevalent antivaccine social media posts that seemingly legitimize debate about vaccine safety and could be contributing to reductions in vaccination rates and increases in vaccine-preventable disease.3 The spread of health-related misinformation is exacerbated by information silos and echo chamber effects. Social media feeds are personally curated and tailored to individual beliefs, partisan bias, and identity. Consequently, information silos are created in which the likelihood for exchange of differing viewpoints

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6062cee8d369fc9e12f50f5848524d96bfe084fb

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Citations in the corpus

Public Health and Online Misinformation: Challenges and Recommendations. (2019, background): “The recommendations above can serve as guidelines, but further research that can inform the development of policy is desperately needed (18).”
Evaluating the Impact of Attempts to Correct Health Misinformation on Social Media: A Meta-Analysis (2020, background): “Acknowledging that many individuals use social media as their primary source of health information (Chou et al., 2018) and that these platforms differ from other media in authorship, oversight, and algorithms (Southwell et al., 2019), assessing the efficacy of corrections on social media can go a…”
Prevalence of Health Misinformation on Social Media: Systematic Review (2021, background): “More specifically, four knowledge gaps have been detected from the field of public health [1].”
Top Concerns of Tweeters During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Infoveillance Study (2020, background): “This was not the focus of this study, but future studies should investigate the spread of “fake news” in combination with infectious disease outbreaks [23].”
Correction Experiences on Social Media During COVID-19 (2021, background): “…misinformation are by no means new, with multiple studies raising alarms about the prevalence of misinformation across social media platforms for emerging disease and enduring health issues (e.g., Broniatowski et al., 2018; Chou et al., 2018; Del Vicario et al., 2016; Guidry et al., 2015).”
Defining Misinformation and Understanding its Bounded Nature: Using Expertise and Evidence for Describing Misinformation (2020, background): “For example, misinformation surrounding the Zika virus has garnered substantial attention since surfacing as a global issue in 2016 (Chou et al., 2018; Wang, McKee, Torbica, & Stuckler, 2019), and misinformation on the issue can deter people from taking appropriate action to protect themselves and…”