The spread of medical fake news in social media – The pilot quantitative study

Highlights

• Fake, misleading and over-interpreted health news in social media is the potential threat for public health.

• Top links related to common diseases in 40% cases contained misinformation and were shared 451 272 times in the period 2012–2017.

• Analyzing social media could contribute to identification and take action on leading web pages polluting medical information.

Abstract

Objectives

Fake news: misinformation and falsehood of health news in social media constitute a potential threat to the public health, but the scope of this issue remains unclear. Our pilot study is an initial attempt to measure a number of the top shared health misinformation stories in the Polish language social media.

Methods

Using the BuzzSumo Application, a range of the top shared health web links in the Polish language social media was assessed during the period between 2012 and 2017. We used the following keywords which were related to the most common diseases and causes of death: cancer, neoplasm, heart attack, stroke, hypertension, diabetes, vaccinations, HIV, and AIDS. Each link was checked for the presence of fake news.

Results

40% of the most frequently shared links contained text we classified as fake news. These were shared more than 450,000 times. The most fallacious content concerned vaccines, while news about cardiovascular diseases was, in general, well sourced and informative. More than 20% of dangerous links from our material was generated by one source.

Conclusions

Analyzing social media top shared news could contribute to identification of leading fake medical information miseducating the society. It might also encourage authorities to take actions such as put warnings on biased domains or scientifically evaluate those generating fake health news.

Introduction

Misinformation concerning health subject is not a new phenomenon - its roots are probably as old as health care itself. In the pre-media era, this problem was centered on the patient-doctor relation and its context [1]. As a result of the radio and television revolutions, and an exponential increase in the global Internet usage, a potential range of harm was brought to a totally new level [2].

Post-truth phase attracted a lot of attention during the United States presidential election in 2016. Afterwards, ‘post-truth’ itself was announced the word of the year by Oxford English Dictionary [3]. The term was getting used more frequently along with ‘fake news’ also in the leading medical journals [3], [4]. It was defined as ‘news that is intentionally false and could mislead readers’ [5]. Two main motives behind fake news were financial and ideological [5]. Public health was confronted with a risk of patients’ exposure to the fallacious and misleading information. It was believed that such a phenomenon might affect health literacy and spread medical conspiracy theories. Indeed, it resulted in behavioral changes and is now emerging as a serious threat to the public health [6], [7]. However, there has not been published many comprehensive analyses concerning this subject yet. Recently, in Poland, as in many other countries, the Internet has consolidated its role as a source of health-related information, easily overtaking other types of media [8]. In response to these rapid changes, we hereby present a pilot study that is an attempt to measure the volume of shares concerning health fake news in the Polish language social media. We investigated most frequently shared articles using keywords related to diseases regarded as the top causes of death in Poland – cerebral stroke, ischemic heart disease, and cancers (together accounting for >60% of total deaths), prevalent chronic diseases – arterial hypertension and diabetes mellitus (32% and 9,5% of total population, respectively) and additionally – vaccinations and HIV/AIDS [9].