(2018-08-31) How Misinfodemics Spread Disease

How Misinfodemics Spread Disease. They called it the Great Stink. In the summer of 1858, London was hit with a heat wave of noxious consequence...Their belief, the miasma theory of disease transmission, had some truth to it—it just wasn’t precise. (Ghost Map)

Now disease also spreads via Facebook statuses and Google results

around the world, digital health misinformation is having increasingly catastrophic impacts on physical health.

You might call these phenomena “misinfodemics”—the spread of a particular health outcome or disease facilitated by viral misinformation.

Researchers led by Brittany Seymour mapped the direct relationship between viral health misinformation and growing advocacy against water fluoridation.

Herd immunity is no longer just a matter of quality public-health ecosystems, where vaccinations and antibiotics alone can prevent the spread of disease, but also of quality public-information ecosystems

as the researchers Richard Carpiano and Nick Fitz have argued, “anti-vaxx” as a concept, describing a group or individual lacking confidence in evidence-based immunization practices, creates a stigma that focuses on the person—the parent as a decision maker or the unvaccinated child—and the community. More often, as Seymour has noted, the problem is rooted in the virality of the message and the environments in which it spreads.

Research demonstrates that public-health digital outreach uses a lot of language and strategies that are inaccessible to the populations it is trying to target. This has created what the researchers Michael Golebiewski and danah boyd call “data voids”: search terms where “available relevant data is limited, non-existent, or deeply problematic.” In examining these environments, researchers such as Renee DiResta at Data for Democracy have documented the sorts of algorithmic rabbit holes that can lead someone into the depths of disturbing, anxiety-inducing, scientific-sounding (albeit unvalidated and potentially harmful) content that often profits from explanations with quick fixes at a cost.

Even the CDC and the Mayo Clinic maintain Instagram presences, though their collective following is 160,000 people, or 0.1 percent of Kim Kardashian’s follower count. Health advocates such as Jennifer Gunter (“Twitter’s resident gynecologist”), who blogs about women’s health, debunking celebrity-endorsed myths to a broad audience, and the Canadian professor Timothy Caulfield, whose health-video series about extreme remedies around the world was recently picked up by Netflix, are gaining recognition online.