Health Misinformation on Social Media

Dear Colleagues,

We are organizing a Special Issue entitled: "Health Misinformation on Social Media" in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. The venue is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that publishes articles and communications in the interdisciplinary area of environmental health sciences and public health. For detailed information on the journal, please refer to https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph.

Today, the success of the Social Web and the massive use of social media is making an increasingly large number of people rely on information diffused on these applications. In fact, in recent years, we have witnessed the explosion of so-called User-Generated Content (UGC), i.e., content diffused by users on social media without almost any traditional form of control of its quality or veracity by reputable third parties. This can represent a problem especially in the health scenario, in which a large portion of people seeks health-related information. This is particularly true in the current situation, characterized by the spread of unverified and low-credibility content about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Prior research indicates that medical professionals do not author an extensive amount of health-related information available on social media. This creates the conditions for spreading false, inaccurate or misleading health-related information, thereby potentially leading ill people away from proper care.

Therefore, the aim of this Special Issue is to address and investigate this problem by assessing perceptions of credibility about health-related information found on social media, under different perspectives. For example, by analyzing the Social Web for identifying suitable sources of health-related information (blogs, microblogs, question-answering systems, etc.); evaluating the impact of health misinformation; studying and implementing models for the credibility assessment of the acquired health-related information from social media; and studying and implementing models for the prevention of health misinformation diffusion in social media.

This Special Issue is aimed at scholars and researchers involved in different research areas, from medical informatics to sociology to medicine, confirming the interdisciplinary character of the journal.