Background/Objectives: Vaccine hesitancy arises from multiple determinants, including individual beliefs, cognitive style, social norms, political identity and the information environment. In this context, health literacy, e-health literacy, suscepti...
30 July 2021
Low digital health literacy affects large percentages of populations around the world and is a direct contributor to the spread of COVID-19-related online misinformation (together with bots). The ease and ‘viral’ nature of social media sharing furthe...
Background: Health-related misinformation is a pervasive phenomenon that expanded substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly regarding concerns about vaccine safety and effectiveness. Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate...
3 June 2025
In an era where information is readily accessible, the dissemination of accurate and reliable health information is crucial for public health promotion. This scoping review explores the impacts of misinformation and disinformation variables on the im...
2 February 2021
Users provide and share information with a broad audience on different forms of social media; however, information accuracy is questionable. Currently, the health information field is severely affected by misinformation. Thus, addressing health misin...
15 February 2022
The increasing availability of online content these days raises several questions about effective access to information. In particular, the possibility for almost everyone to generate content with no traditional intermediary, if on the one hand led t...
Online health misinformation has become a persistent challenge for public health communication, medical decision-making, and digital information governance. Effective health fact-checking requires evidence-based verification rather than claim-only cl...
Background/Objectives: The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted how infodemics—an excessive amount of both accurate and misleading information—undermine health responses. Artificial intelligence (AI) and digital tools have been increasingly appl...
Misinformation has emerged as a significant threat to both society and public health, with social media acting as a major conduit for its dissemination. This contributes to harmful health outcomes and undermines trust in authoritative institutions. I...
2 March 2024
Background: Health misinformation, which was particularly prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic, hampers public health initiatives. Spanish-speaking communities in the San Francisco Bay Area may be especially affected due to low digital health liter...
This study proposes a domain-augmented fine-tuning strategy for improving emotion recognition in health misinformation using pre-trained large language models (LLMs). The proposed method aims to address key limitations of existing approaches, includi...
In the context of increasing online health misinformation, several new approaches have been deployed to reduce the spread and increase the quality of information consumed. This systematic review examines how source credibility labels and other nudgin...
20 December 2022
Health misinformation about nutrition and other health aspects on social media is a current public health concern. Healthcare professionals play an essential role in efforts to detect and correct it. The present study focuses on analyzing the use of...
Background/Objectives: Health misinformation on social media is a growing public health concern, yet less is known about whom the public holds primarily responsible for reducing it. This study examined sociodemographic differences in U.S. adults&rsqu...
The spread of unverified health claims about drugs, dietary supplements, and alternative remedies on social media poses a growing public health concern. In this study, we present a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline that uses large languag...
Unregulated herbal products marketed via digital platforms present escalating risks to consumer safety and regulatory effectiveness worldwide. This study positions the case of Jindamanee herbal powder—a banned substance under Thai law—as...
Background: Oral health misinformation has increasingly proliferated across social media platforms in China, prompting rising concerns about the accuracy of health-related content. Fact-checking intent has been identified as a key strategy for mitiga...
U.S. Spanish-speaking populations experienced gaps in timely COVID-19 information during the pandemic and disproportionate misinformation exposure. Brigada Digital de Salud was established to address these gaps with culturally tailored, Spanish-langu...
Background/Objectives: Social media has become a common source of information about dental implant treatment. While it offers easy access to treatment-related information, concerns remain about the quality and accuracy of online content. This study e...
Background/Objectives: Reproductive-health topics such as polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), endometriosis, fertility, and menstruation attract both unsupported claims and stigmatizing framing on social media. We present an evidence-grounded pipeline...
In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on the pervasive issue of medical misinformation in social networks from the perspective of information technology. The survey aims at providing a systematic review of related research and helping rese...
The spread of health-related misinformation has become a significant global challenge, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study introduces a comprehensive framework for detecting and analyzing misinformation using advanced natural langua...
9 August 2022
From the epidemic center in Wuhan to the entirety of China, with the growing infected population, people are seeking and processing health-related information both online and from traditional media outlets such as newspapers. Online misinformation re...
9 April 2022
Social and mass media platforms (SMM) are essential tools for keeping people informed about health-promoting practices. However, the potential to spread misinformation or false rumors exists. These might influence preventive health behaviours and inc...
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) can rapidly produce persuasive health information in the form of text, synthetic images, cloned voices and deepfake videos. It can also be used to create fictitious professional identities. This narrative revie...
The rapid dissemination of health misinformation on the Internet and social media has become a growing challenge for public health, particularly in terms of health information credibility. Promising efforts have been made to detect misinformation usi...
Driven by competition for attention, WeChat public accounts often use sensational or weakly supported health claims in article titles. Such titles may mislead users or be accepted, repeated, or amplified by large language models (LLMs). However, dedi...
21 May 2021
While the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is spreading all over the world, misinformation, without prudent journalistic judgments of media content online, has begun circulating rapidly and influencing public opinion on social media. This quantit...
13 November 2021
Instagram (IG) reaches millions of people, sharing personal content and all kinds of information, including those related to exercise and health. However, the scientific quality of the posted information is questionable. Thus, this study aimed to ana...
In the era of big-data-driven multi-platform and multimodal health information dissemination, the rapid spread of false and misleading content poses a critical threat to public health awareness and decision making. To address this issue, a dual-strea...
7 April 2021
Health misinformation can cause harm if regulators or private remediators falsely claim that a hazardous facility is safe. This misinformation especially threatens the health of children, minorities, and poor people, disproportionate numbers of whom...
To understand the susceptibility to nutrition-health misinformation related to preventing, treating, or mitigating the risk of COVID-19 during the initial lockdowns around the world, the present international web-based survey study (15 April–15 May 2...
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed substantial variation in vaccine attitudes and susceptibility to misinformation, raising concerns from an occupational health perspective about potential differences across employment sectors. This study examined associ...
21 November 2022
The “infodemic” is one of the main obstacles in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to face it, health literacy (HL) is essential since it allows for knowledge about COVID-19 and the practice of preventive measures to be fos...
Misinformation such as on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) drugs, vaccination or presentation of its treatment from untrusted sources have shown dramatic consequences on public health. Authorities have deployed several surveillance tools to detect...
Background/Objectives: The rapid expansion of social media platforms has profoundly changed the way adolescents access reproductive health information. While digital environments increase accessibility to contraceptive content, they also facilitate t...
While the precise conceptualization of the term misinformation remains a subject of debate, the current entry defines misinformation as any type of information which is misleading or false, regardless of intent. The COVID-19 pandemic has seen the rap...
The term “Anthropocene Syndrome” describes the wicked interrelated challenges of our time. These include, but are not limited to, unacceptable poverty (of both income and opportunity), grotesque biodiversity losses, climate change, environmental degr...
This review examines the evolving relationship between social media use and health from the perspective of the World Health Organization (WHO), which defines health as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being. Drawing on recent emp...
Health misinformation across digital platforms has emerged as a critical fast-growing challenge to global public health, undermining trust in science and contributing to vaccine hesitancy, treatment refusal and heightened health risks. In response, t...
25 January 2022
Unparalleled levels of misinformation have contributed to widespread misunderstandings about the nature of the coronavirus, its cure and preventative measures. Misinformation crosses borders rapidly with the help of social media, and this phenomenon...
Digital ecosystems, misinformation exposure, mental-health vulnerability and unequal access to care create distinctive challenges for young people. Although youth participation in health governance is increasingly advocated internationally, structure...
Background and Objectives: Schizophrenia is a significant public health issue, and YouTube has become an increasingly popular source of health information. This study aims to assess the quality and validity of YouTube videos about schizophrenia, focu...
27 April 2022
Background: In this narrative review, we address the COVID-19 pandemic mis–dis information crisis in which healthcare systems have been pushed to their limits, with collapses occurring worldwide. The context of uncertainty has resulted in skept...
During the COVID-19 pandemic, online media were the most widely used sources of scientific information. Often, they are also the only ones on science-related topics. Research has shown that much of the information available on the Internet about the...
The recent health crisis and the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence have caused misinformation on social media to flourish by becoming more sophisticated and challenging to detect. This calls upon fact-checking and questions users’ co...
Food health misinformation poses risks to public well-being, often spreading through social media and interpersonal contexts. This study extends the Influence of Presumed Media Influence (IPMI) model to explain how individuals move from attention to...
Background: Although cervical cancer is a highly preventable malignancy, Romania continues to report critical mortality rates. This paradox is largely attributable to the suboptimal implementation of clinical guidelines and a passive, “opt-in&r...
29 November 2022
The characteristics and influence of the echo chamber effect (TECE) of health misinformation diffusion on social media have been investigated by researchers, but the formation mechanism of TECE needs to be explored specifically and deeply. This resea...
Background: The COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by an infodemic that promoted the use of so-called “miracle products” lacking scientific evidence, posing significant public health risks. Despite increasing concern, evidence on effective...
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