With more and more people consulting ‘Dr Google’ to diagnose any health symptoms they may have, it’s increasingly important that the information they find is reliable. Unfortunately, that is often not the case, and there have even been campaigns by health officials to try and deter people from going online for support, such has been the concern about misinformation.
Arguably the most infamous example of misinformation in recent years was the unwarranted concern raised about the Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccine after stories emerged in 1998 that it was linked to autism.
Despite those claims being widely debunked, a recent study from Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS) finds that misinformation about the vaccine is still common online.
Spreading misinformation
The researchers analyzed the web pages in the top 200 positions for searchers on the ‘vaccines autism’ keyword. Worryingly they found that up to 24% of the websites have a negative stance on vaccines, with such a website listed in the top 10 of both UK and Australian versions of Google (although not on Google.com).
“This study reveals a pollution of the health information available to the public with misinformation that can potentially impact on public health. It also shows that weak scientific studies can have a detrimental impact on the public,” the authors say.
False sites also ranked highly in the Italian, French, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese and Arabic versions of Google, with the authors suggesting this is partly because of differences in ranking algorithms in various countries, but also because of variety in both medical content and browsing habits in these countries.
“The approach of using Google search results to monitor the information available could be a useful tool for identifying countries at greater risk of misinformation. Public health organisations should be aware of the information people can find online when designing vaccination campaigns,” the authors say.
Deliberately misleading
Of course, there are also instances of deliberate misinformation being spread. Earlier this year I wrote about a recent study from researchers at the University of Southern California, who explored how bot accounts were being used to spread misinformation about electronic cigarettes.
The researchers examined over 2.2 million e-cigarette related tweets over a 5 month period, and the authors believe their work is the first study of its kind to be done. The analysis found that the bots were twice as likely to promote both e-cigarette products and also the notion that they can help people to quit smoking than human users.
“Social bots can pass on health advice that hasn’t been scientifically proven,” the authors say. “The jury is still out on if e-cigarettes are useful smoking cessation tools, but studies have shown that the chemicals in vape juice are harmful. Scientists are still trying to understand if vaping damages the respiratory and cardiovascular system. Bottom line: Online falsehoods can influence offline behavior.”
As searching for health online has become more popular, there have been a number of projects aiming to highlight reputable sources. The Information Standard for instance is a NHS run project aiming to ‘kitemark’ reputable sources of content, but it doesn’t extend very far online yet, with just 250 websites covered.
One site that does is Geneva based Health on the Net who aim to provide a reputation score for sites with quality information. They’re slightly more wide reaching than The Information Standard, with 5,000 sites included.
I suspect that until now you’ve remained blissfully unaware of these services however, and they don’t show up anywhere in the Google search results, and the badges provided by these services probably aren’t noticed by the majority of users.
Suffice to say, Google do take reputation into account already when ranking sites, but I suspect the only real solution is to take this a step further, maybe including the seal of approval from sites like the two above in their algorithm.
