Health Misinformation on YouTube

Contributor: Socrates Dissatisfied

Photo by Giulia May on Unsplash

The internet has democratized access to information, placing often-overwhelming quantities of it at the fingertips of anyone with a computer, a smartphone, or—probably, in the near-ish future—direct neural interface.

But this panacea of information is a pharmakon: the Greek progenitor of ‘pharmacology’, denoting both “remedy” and “poison.” What can cure can also sicken, or even kill, depending how it is used. Likewise, the internet furnishes abundant means to increase either one’s knowledge, or one’s ignorance. To avoid the latter requires the application of critical thinking, and not merely a reliance on the search and recommendation algorithms of sites like YouTube or Google. This post—the first in a series on information and disinformation—concerns a recent study, by Anja Susarla, Professor of Information Systems at Michigan State, of medical misinformation on YouTube. Her piece appears on The Conversation, an excellent source of accessible articles written by leading academics.

In a nutshell, Professor Susarla asked a panel of physicians to assess the medical information in videos YouTube’s algorithm recommended as most “relevant” to certain health-related searches. The results were not good. After all, search and recommendation algorithms are primarily designed to guide you to what you want to find, rather than to the information you really ought to have, from a pragmatic medical perspective. YouTube’s algorithms are “biased toward engagement and popularity”: toward whatever is most likely to keep you coming back for more. The false hopes and exciting conspiracy theories on offer from a parade of charlatans often prove more appealing than frank discussions of the brutal facts of human mortality.

Distinguishing between good and bad medical advice requires not just critical thinking skills, but also health literacy: “the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions.” Thus, Professor Susarla rightly points out, medical misinformation in the U.S. poses a particular threat to minority groups, which are often disproportionately ill-served when it comes to the types of resources, education, and outreach necessary to foster health literacy in a population.

There are, however, plenty of good sources of health information out there, such as Mayo Clinic, the Johns Hopkins Medicine Health Library, and MedlinePlus.gov. Johns Hopkins and the NIH both provide helpful guides for finding and evaluating health information online. Useful fact-checking sites—not restricted to health information—include Snopes, PolitiFact, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

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