How to spot health misinformation online

In 2023, a couple of 'momfluencers' (mums with a big social media following) racked up millions of views on TikTok claiming that pregnancy turns your sweat blue and makes your teeth fall out. Studies have found that over half of mental health advice on TikTok and almost 45 per cent of nutrition posts on Instagram contain inaccurate or dangerous information (such as a post that claimed eating an orange in the shower can treat anxiety).

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What is the harm?

The harm caused by health misinformation varies. Sometimes, it’s just about wasted time or money, but a 2023 study found that nearly 75 per cent of Youtube videos and 50 per cent of TikTok videos about birth control discouraged using it. Recent data from Wales shows a drop in the number of women using hormonal contraception and a rise in the number of abortions; researchers linked this to contraception misinformation. TikTok and Instagram are littered with posts about turmeric to fight inflammation, but the Australian Government and the US Drug Liver Injury Network have both warned about a rise in liver injuries from taking turmeric supplements. Dermatologists are reporting higher numbers of people with sun damage after scare stories were circulated about sunscreen causing skin cancer rather than preventing it.

“More than half of us, across all generations, now go on social media as a first port of call for health information, before we go to places like the NHS, the World Health Organisation or call 111,” says Dr Rachael Kent, author of The Digital Health Self: Wellness, Self-Tracking, and Social Media and a leading researcher into how digital technologies shape our health at Kings College London. “Social media is now a public health platform – and it’s completely unregulated.”

I’ve been writing about health and nutrition for more than two decades, covering topics like allergies, diabetes and women’s health. I receive health misinformation all the time: when I wrote about how badly menopause supplements are legislated in the UK, my feeds filled up with sponsored posts about exactly the products I was investigating; when I started writing a book on allergies I was deluged with accounts saying probiotics and local honey can ‘cure’ them (there is no evidence for either).

Misinformation is not new – the smallpox vaccine was rumoured to turn people int0 cows in the 1800s – but recently I have become more and more alarmed by the way in which our understanding of health has shifted from away from being expert-led and evidence-based, to being guided by ideology and opinions, opinions which now spread at hyper-speed across social media and straight into the mouths of the AI chatbots that one in six of us (and 25 per cent of younger people) regularly use for healthcare advice.

Why are we relying on social media for health info?

The pandemic pushed a lot of healthcare online, which made us much more comfortable using digital devices to manage our wellbeing. At the same time, health services all over the world began to crack under the pressure of covid, it became harder to see a doctor in real life and waiting lists grew ever longer.

Then, at-home covid testing got us used to monitoring our bodies, and the wellness industry saw an opportunity to sell us home tests for everything from our hormones to nutrient levels to our cancer risk, often endorsed by celebs. (The global home health testing market is forecast to be worth $12.3 billion by 2034.)

Add to that the booming wellness tech industry and its ability to make wearable health-tracking devices like blood glucose monitors feel as ordinary as carrying a set of house keys, and you’ve got perfect conditions for an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation. Included in that is growing distrust of experts and institutions; a belief that perfect health is achievable with the right kit, diet and supplements; tech and tests generating buckets of personal health data, some of it alarming; and family doctors with many better things to do than support us through interpreting it. Our brains begin to trust information we see repeatedly. Seeing the same people on social media over and over creates parasocial relationships – where you feel like you know the creator personally – which make us more likely to trust unqualified influencers, sharks and grifters like they’re our friends. Plus, if you’re from a minority group and already experience unequal access to healthcare, have a health condition which isn’t well researched or just happen to be a woman, you’re even more vulnerable to being exploited. (Although, as Dr Kent puts it: “ If you are online, you are vulnerable to health misinformation.”) Finally, we’ve got people like Robert F. Kennedy making unfounded claims about everything from vaccines to paracetamol.

The costs of internalising misinformation can be shatteringly high. Twenty three-year-old Paloma Shemirani died in 2024 after being influenced by her mother Kay to refuse chemotherapy for treatable cancer. Kay Shemirani is an anti-medicine influencer who worked as a nurse before being struck off for spreading covid misinformation. Paloma's brothers, Gabriel and Sebastian, blame Kay and are campaigning for better protections for people like Paloma. Kay has repeatedly rejected any accusations that her beliefs contributed to Paloma’s choice to reject conventional treatment, and blames the NHS for intervening in her daughter’s illness.

“The narrative of misinformation needs polarisation and divisiveness in order to then grift,” says Jonathan Stea, a clinical psychologist at the University of Calgary and author of Mind The Science: Saving Your Mental Health from the Wellness Industry. “ The [wellness industry] messaging is that modern medicine, healthcare professionals and scientists don't know what the hell they're doing, that they're in it for Big Pharma and their own paychecks and you can't trust anything that they say. And then the wellness industry says: ‘But we have the knowledge; we are the ones who have the true pathways to health’. When you dig deeper into those treatment approaches, they have very limited evidence to support their use. If you tell them that, though, they'll say all science is corrupt anyway.”

How to spot misinformation

So how can we protect ourselves? “We need to understand the language of pseudoscientific grift – for example, are they elevating anecdotal evidence; are they just plastering testimonials everywhere saying that their treatment works?” says Stea. Look out for technical-sounding terms like ‘beadlet delivery’ or ‘liposomal encapsulation’ – both just mean supplement ingredients are held in an oil-like suspension and mean little about the product itself. Do they describe their health product as ‘natural’ and therefore better than scientifically validated treatments?

We also need to recognise that social media algorithms are built to prefer extreme content – and so are we, explains Kent. “ Our feeds are tailored according to what goes viral and the algorithm amplifies the most sensationalist claims, personalised to our own preferences.”

What other red flags should we look for? “ Outlandish lifestyle overhaul, transformation claims,” says Kent. “ No one behaviour or supplement is going change our health in the ways that social media content suggests they can. Look out for trends: it used to be kale and coconut oil, now it’s protein and collagen supplements.”

“ Are they trying to sell you something?” says Katie Suleta, a Denver-based science communicator who researches misinformation. “That can be hard to discern, as marketing can be really subtle – it’s similar to how cigarettes were made to seem cool by infiltrating the culture. Try to figure out if they are aligned with scientific consensus. What are reputable agencies saying on the same topic?”

Working out what qualifications an influencer has is important, but also hard – and medical training doesn’t necessarily rule out misinformation anyway. In 2023, multiple US-registered dietitians were found to have been paid by a drinks company to post about aspartame not being a carcinogen (WHO lists it as being “possibly carcinogenic to humans”) without declaring their interests.

It’s a lot easier to let misinformation wash over us every time we scroll and, depressingly, there are many more misinformed content creators who are good at going viral than those who fight misinformation. There is little sign that platforms or governments want – or even know how – to reverse the tide. So it has to be up to us to do the work and refuse to be taken in.

Further reading:

Why your ‘mouth microbiome’ is the new ‘gut health’
What is intuitive eating?
A balanced diet for women
A balanced diet for men
All our healthy recipe collections
More health & nutrition tips

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