ArticleHealth promotion international2025
Social media and the spread of misinformation: infectious and a threat to public health.
Article in Health promotion international, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 58 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
58 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- [Social media in anesthesiology: a systematic review on typology as well as opportunities and risks].Die Anaesthesiologie · 2026Pooled it
- Why do people trust (or mistrust) health organizations? A systematic review.International journal for equity in health · 2026Pooled it
- Good science, poor visibility? Communicating behavioural nutrition and physical activity evidence in the algorithmic attention economy.The international journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity · 2026Article
- Digital Health Literacy in Pediatric Rheumatic Disease: A Qualitative Study Using Interpretive Description.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Beyond the hashtag: a content analysis of #womenshealth posts on Instagram.Health promotion international · 2026Article
- From Evidence to Engagement: Understanding Online Resistance to Community Water Fluoridation for Public Health Communication-A Qualitative Study.Journal of public health dentistry · 2026Article
- Development and Preliminary Evaluation of the OCODES Digital Strategy in Response to Health Misinformation: Nominal Group Technique and Retrospective Usability Evaluation Study.JMIR formative research · 2026Article
- The evolution of applied field epidemiology training in Canada: The last fifty years, and a vision for the future.Canada communicable disease report = Releve des maladies transmissibles au Canada · 2026Article
- Applying the Ottawa Charter to evaluate health literacy outcomes of the Little Aussie Bugs course for Australian early childhood educators.Health promotion international · 2026Article
- Legitimacy, trust and readiness for implementing lifestyle medicine in England: a cross-sectional study.BMJ open · 2026Article
- Evaluating the content quality and trustworthiness of snakebite envenomation videos on social media platforms: insights from TikTok and Bilibili.Tropical medicine and health · 2026Article
- Cancer Education in the Age of TikTok and Social Media: Opportunity or Misinformation?Journal of cancer education : the official journal of the American Association for Cancer Education · 2026Article
- Associations of critical thinking and social media addiction with eHealth literacy among adolescent social media users.BMC nursing · 2026Article
- Social Media in Pacific Communities: A Scoping Review Exploring Benefits, Challenges and Opportunities for Healthcare.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Using Social Media to Maximize the Research Impact of Surgeons: Exploratory Linguistic Analysis.JMIR formative research · 2026Article
- Time to Address Eating Disorder Risk Among Medical Students.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Review
- Structural Inequalities in Online Health Information Seeking: Cross-National Multilevel Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Article
- Diversity and perceptions about side effects of medicinal plants used by herbalists to treat gastrointestinal diseases in Sironko District, Eastern Uganda.Tropical medicine and health · 2026Article
- Social learning theory application and potential in health education conducted by healthcare workers on TikTok - a content analysis observational study.BMC public health · 2026Observational
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Misinformation has been identified as a major threat to society and public health. Social media significantly contributes to the spread of misinformation and has a global reach. Health misinformation has a range of adverse outcomes, including influencing individuals' decisions (e.g. choosing not to vaccinate), and the erosion of trust in authoritative institutions. There are many interrelated causes of the misinformation problem, including the ability of non-experts to rapidly post information, the influence of bots and social media algorithms. Equally, the global nature of social media, limited commitment for action from social media giants, and rapid technological advancements hamper progress for improving information quality and accuracy in this setting. In short, it is a problem that requires a constellation of synergistic actions aimed at social media users, content creators, companies, and governments. A public health approach to social media-based misinformation that includes tertiary, secondary, and primary prevention may help address immediate impacts, long-term consequences, and root causes of misinformation. Tertiary prevention to 'treat' this problem involves increased monitoring, misinformation debunking, and warning labels on social media posts that are at a high risk of containing misinformation. Secondary prevention strategies include nudging interventions (e.g. prompts about preventing misinformation that appear when sharing content) and education to build media and information literacy. Finally, there is an urgent need for primary prevention, including systems-level changes to address key mechanisms of misinformation and international law to regulate the social media industry. Anything less means misinformation-and its societal consequences-will continue to spread.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.