Detecting Disinformation about Health in Social Media: A Review of Four Inductive Studies

Social media enable fast and widespread dissemination of information, both honest and dishonest. Misinformation is generally spread unintentionally. Disinformation, on the other hand, is intentionally dishonest and is designed to harm individuals and organizations, which usually benefts the sender fnancially. Health-related disinformation can be especially dangerous if people act on its claims. How do people determine if health content on social media is honest or if it contains disinformation? This review considers four papers about inductive research studies, where participants were exposed to actual social media posts about 10 health topics, ranging from weight loss to COVID-19 vaccines. Some of the posts were honest and some were dishonest. Participants in all four studies were asked to evaluate the veracity of the posts that they saw and to provide the reasons for their evaluations. Two studies were online surveys. The other studies were conducted in the lab, where the eye movements of participants were recorded with an eye tracker. The key fndings from the review were: (1) People were relatively good at detecting health-related disinformation, with detection success rates ranging from 66% to 90%; (2) People most frequently cited the quality of the source of a post as the reason they decided it was honest; (3) Variables key to successful detection were need for cognition and gender (and to a lesser extent, political aÿliation, education, and age); (4) In the eye tracking studies, the most common determinants of fxations on particular parts of a post were need for cognition, gender, and the veracity of the post; (5) The most important measure of fxation that infuenced detection success was number of fxations; and (6) Overall, need for cognition was the key factor in successful disinformation detection.