The Supreme Court heard arguments on Monday in a case that involves the Biden administration’s efforts to communicate with social media sites about posts officials believed made false or misleading claims about Covid-19 vaccines and the pandemic. While the case has primarily focused on a debate around free speech, it also has put a spotlight on the potential harms of medical misinformation — which experts say has become increasingly complex and difficult to identify.
“It’s all changing really fast, and it’s even harder for the average person to filter out,” said Dr. Anish Agarwal, an emergency physician in Philadelphia.
Health hacks not backed by science have spread widely on social media platforms. The same kinds of conspiracy theories that helped to fuel vaccine hesitancy during the Covid-19 pandemic are now undermining trust in vaccines against other diseases, including measles, as more people have lost confidence in public health experts and institutions. And rapid developments in artificial intelligence have made it even harder for people to tell what’s true and what’s false online.
“We’re understanding more that it’s not just a poisoned stream of information that people are getting, but a feedback loop where we have loss of trust, and we have misinformation, and the misinformation can lead to loss of trust,” said Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
Keep an eye out for instances where claims online jump to conclusions without evidence, or appeal to your emotions, Dr. Sell advised. When you see a piece of medical content online, ask yourself: Does any aspect of the message seem designed to hook you? Does the message seem engineered to make you upset or concerned? Does the source correct itself when it makes a mistake?
Misinformation commonly includes “fake experts,” according to Sander van der Linden, a professor of social psychology in society at Cambridge who researches misinformation. These are either people making health claims who do not have any medical credentials, or doctors making statements about topics that they are not experts in. “You wouldn’t want to go to an ear and nose doctor to do a heart operation,” he said. “Is this a vaccine expert, or is this a doctor who actually does no research and has no expertise on vaccinations?”