More than 90% of internet users are active on social media, which had 4.76 billion users worldwide in January 2023. The digital revolution has reshaped the news landscape and changed how users interact with information. Social media has fostered an active relationship with the media, including the ability to interact directly with the content presented. It also has augmented media’s ability to reach a large audience with tight deadlines.
These developments suggest that social media can be a useful tool in everyday medical practice for professionals and patients. But social media also can spread misinformation, as happened during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This characteristic is the focus of the latest research by Fabiana Zollo, a computer science professor at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, and coordinator of the Data Science for Society laboratory. The research was published in The BMJ. Ms. Zollo’s research group aims to assess the effect of social media on misinformation and consequent behaviors related to health. “The study results focus primarily on two topics, the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccinations, but can also be applied to other health-related behaviors such as smoking and diet,” Ms. Zollo told Univadis Italy.
Social media has become an important tool for public health organizations to inform and educate citizens. Institutions can use it to monitor choices and understand which topics are being discussed most at a given time, thus comprehending how the topics evolve and take shape in public discourse. “This could lead to the emergence of people’s perceptions, allowing us to understand, among other things, what the population’s needs might be, including informational needs,” said Ms. Zollo.
Tenuous Causal Link
While social media offers public health organizations the opportunity to inform and engage the public, it also raises concerns about misinformation and the difficulty of measuring its effect on health behavior. Although some studies have observed correlations between exposure to misinformation on social media and levels of adherence to vaccination campaigns, establishing a causal link is complex. As the authors emphasize, “despite the importance of the effect of social media and misinformation on people’s behavior and the broad hypotheses within public and political debates, the current state of the art cannot provide definitive conclusions on a clear causal association between social media and health behaviors.” Establishing a clear causal link between information obtained from social media and offline behavior is challenging due to methodologic limitations and the complexity of connections between online and offline behaviors. Studies often rely on self-reported data, which may not accurately reflect real behaviors, and struggle to isolate the effect of social media from other external influences. Moreover, many studies primarily focus on Western countries, limiting the generalizability of the results to other cultural and geographical conditions.
Another issue highlighted by Ms. Zollo and colleagues is the lack of complete and representative data. Studies often lack detailed information about participants, such as demographic or geolocation data, and rely on limited samples. This lack makes it difficult to assess the effect of misinformation on different segments of the population and in different geographic areas.
“The main methodologic difficulty concerns behavior, which is difficult to measure because it would require tracking a person’s actions over time and having a shared methodology to do so. We need to understand whether online stated intentions do or do not translate into actual behaviors,” said Ms. Zollo. Therefore, despite the recognized importance of the effect of social media and misinformation on people’s general behavior and the broad hypotheses expressed within public and political debates, the current state of the art cannot provide definitive conclusions on a causal association between social media and health behaviors.