Misinfodemics, a term coined in 2018 by Meedan researchers, is a phenomenon in which online health misinformation contributes to the spread of real world disease.
The Lab’s new report notes that at both individual and population levels, low-quality online content about health topics can influence vaccination rates and herd immunity, the appropriate use of antibiotics and treatment regimens, the adoption of response efforts in epidemics, and access to care for serious illnesses.
The impact that this is having on population health suggests it is critical and urgent to re-think and innovate around the way we approach health misinformation.
Tags
Footnotes
- Online conversations are heavily influenced by news coverage, like the 2022 Supreme Court decision on abortion. The relationship is less clear between big breaking news and specific increases in online misinformation.
- The tweets analyzed were a random sample qualitatively coded as “misinformation” or “not misinformation” by two qualitative coders trained in public health and internet studies.
- This method used Twitter’s historical search API
- The peak was a significant outlier compared to days before it using Grubbs' test for outliers for Chemical Abortion (p<0.2 for the decision; p<0.003 for the leak) and Herbal Abortion (p<0.001 for the decision and leak).
- All our searches were case insensitive and could match substrings; so, “revers” matches “reverse”, “reversal”, etc.
References
Authors
Words by
No items found.
No items found.
Words by
Organization
Published on
February 25, 2020
April 20, 2022
