Health Misinformation

Health misinformation can cause immediate physical harm and erode trust in medicine. Comparing 30,000 health news articles, we found that unreliable outlets write more engaging headlines, often by withholding key information, while reliable outlets offer more references and graphics.

We built a dataset in which professional health journalists scored articles on ten quality indicators, and trained models that predict those scores with an average F-measure of 85%. With clinicians at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, we study health content on TikTok, Reddit and Pinterest.