Combating Online Health Misinformation

Danger of health misinformation online, long a concern of medical and public health professionals, has come to the forefront of societal concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic. Regardless of their motives, creators and sharers of misinformation promote non-evidence-based health advice and treatment recommendations, and often deny health methods, measures, and approaches that are supported by the best evidence of the time. Unfortunately, many infrastructural, social, and cognitive factors make individuals vulnerable to misinformation. This book aims to assist information and health professionals and educators with all phases of information provision and support, from understanding users’ information needs, to building relationships, to helping users verify and evaluate sources. The book can be used as a textbook in library and information science programs, as well as nursing, communication, journalism, psychology, and informatics programs. The book, written from the e-health literacy perspective, is unique in its nuanced approach to misinformation. It draws on psychology and information science to explain human susceptibility to misinformation and discusses ways to engage with the public deeply and meaningfully, fostering trust and raising health and information literacy. It is organized into three parts. Part I: The Ecology of Online Health Information' overviews the digital health information universe, showing that misinformation is prevalent, dangerous, and difficult to define. Part II: Susceptibility to Misinformation: Literacies as Safeguards addresses factors and competencies that affect individual vulnerability and resilience. Part III: Solutions focuses on education and community engagement initiatives that help the public locate and evaluate health information. Chapters within the three Parts discuss technological innovation and social media as posing novel risks as well as presenting novel solutions to helping the public connect with high quality information and building trusting relationships among the public and information and health professionals.

Young people develop health literacy skills in a variety of environments, facing critical thinking challenges about their health from school, home and family life, peers and social life, and online. To explore the development of health literacy skills in youth, the Roundtable on Health Literacy convened a workshop on November 19, 2019, in Washington, DC. Presenters at the workshop discussed factors relating to health literacy skills and ways to further develop those skills among youth from early childhood to young adulthood. This publication summarizes the presentation and discussion of the workshop.

"This book is a collective resource with comprehensive knowledge in the areas of misinformation and disinformation, not only about misinformation/ disinformation in social media and politics, but also discusses misinformation and disinformation in other fields particularly organization, health, and the economy"--

Fraudulent, harmful, or at best useless pharmaceutical and therapeutic approaches developed outside science-based medicine have boomed in recent years, especially due to the commercialisation of cyberspace. The latter has played a fundamental role in the rise of false ‘health experts’, and in the creation of filter bubbles and echo chambers that have contributed to the formation of highly polarised debates on non-science-based health practices—online as well as offline. By adopting a multidisciplinary approach, this edited book brings together contributions of international academics and practitioners from criminology, digital sociology, health psychology, medicine, law, physics, and journalism, where they critically analyse different types of non-science-based health approaches. With this volume, we aim to reconcile different scientific understandings of these practices, synthesising a variety of empirical, theoretical and interpretative approaches, and exploring the challenges, implications and potential remedies to the spread of dangerous and misleading health information. This edited book will offer some food for thought not only to students and academics in the social sciences, health psychology and medicine among other disciplines, but also to medical practitioners, science journalists, debunkers, policy makers and the general public, as they might all benefit from a greater awareness and critical knowledge of the harms caused by non-scientific health practices.

Medical professionals are increasingly engaging with social media in an effort to provide credible evidence-based information and combat the misinformation that patients are finding online and bringing to office visits. Medical professionals are uniquely poised to recognize the harm that can come from applying the incorrect information to decisions affecting one’s health, while they are also able to serve as valued and knowledgeable experts online and engage with patients and the public to provide accurate, up-to-date information. Social Media for Medical Professionals: Strategies for Successfully Engaging in an Online World is a unique, first-of-its-kind resource, providing specific social media strategies for engagement, as well as advice regarding best practices for professionals to maintain at all times. Chapters discuss many aspects pertaining to social media, covering the basics, researching and assessing credible medical information online, and best practices for discussing myths and misconceptions with patients. Later chapters cover the benefits of engaging in social media as a medical professional, strategies for increasing engagement and building an audience, various options and platforms for content creation and finding your niche, dos’s and don’ts regarding patient privacy, and strategies for dealing with negative comments online. A uniquely practical resource, Social Media for Medical Professionals: Strategies for Successfully Engaging in an Online World will be of interest to medical professionals across the spectrum of healthcare, from the student to the seasoned clinician, providing valuable perspective on practicing medicine in an evolving digital world.

Combining and integrating cross-institutional data remains a challenge for both researchers and those involved in patient care. Patient-generated data can contribute precious information to healthcare professionals by enabling monitoring under normal life conditions and also helping patients play a more active role in their own care. This book presents the proceedings of MEDINFO 2019, the 17th World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics, held in Lyon, France, from 25 to 30 August 2019. The theme of this year’s conference was ‘Health and Wellbeing: E-Networks for All’, stressing the increasing importance of networks in healthcare on the one hand, and the patient-centered perspective on the other. Over 1100 manuscripts were submitted to the conference and, after a thorough review process by at least three reviewers and assessment by a scientific program committee member, 285 papers and 296 posters were accepted, together with 47 podium abstracts, 7 demonstrations, 45 panels, 21 workshops and 9 tutorials. All accepted paper and poster contributions are included in these proceedings. The papers are grouped under four thematic tracks: interpreting health and biomedical data, supporting care delivery, enabling precision medicine and public health, and the human element in medical informatics. The posters are divided into the same four groups. The book presents an overview of state-of-the-art informatics projects from multiple regions of the world; it will be of interest to anyone working in the field of medical informatics.

This book constitutes selected and revised papers from the First International Workshop on Combating On​line Ho​st​ile Posts in ​Regional Languages dur​ing Emerge​ncy Si​tuation, CONSTRAINT 2021, Collocated with AAAI 2021, held as virtual event, in February 2021. The 14 full papers and 9 short papers presented were thoroughly reviewed and selected from 62 qualified submissions. The papers present interdisciplinary approaches on multilingual social media analytics and non-conventional ways of combating online hostile posts.

A state-of-the-art account of what we know and do not know about the effects of digital technology on democracy.