According to a recent study, most teenagers have trouble distinguishing between genuine and false health information online. Researchers discovered that 41% of teenagers couldn’t differentiate between fake and real online medical material.
Most teenagers cannot differentiate between fake and genuine online health information
The survey comes amid rising false health information and other topics, like vaccination efforts, which continue to harm public safety campaigns. Principal study investigator Dr. Radomir Masaryk said that during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a rise in the spread of false health information.
According to Dr. Masaryk, unreliable digital health messages are frequently inadequate and wrong. In addition, they may encourage risk-taking, bad health decisions, and a loss of faith in public health organizations such as the CDC.
Since 71% of adolescents are on the internet, the research focused on this demographic since it is simple for misleading information to spread among groups of adolescents and children.
Masaryk added, “As adolescents are frequent users of the internet, we usually expect that they already know how to approach and appraise online information, but the opposite seems to be true.”
How do you recognize fake health messages?
According to the study, teenagers’ faith in websites is influenced by the language employed and how they appear. For example, they’re more inclined to believe it if it comes from an authoritative institution, a well-known brand, or a site that uses formal language.
The study assessed how altering the contents and format of online health communications affects their credibility in the eyes of teenagers. According to the findings, alterations frequently use superlatives, clickbait, grammatical errors, authoritative allure, and bold typefaces.
Around 41% of adolescents cannot distinguish between fake and genuine online health messages, and 11% were convinced that genuine, unedited content was less trustworthy compared to fake content. According to the study, most teenagers could not differentiate between fake and real online material when the content appeared plausible.
According to the study author, a message having a clickbait header was the only variation of health communication that was considerably less trustworthy than a genuine health message.
