Duke Medical Ethics Journal

High levels of public trust for doctors and nurses underlines the importance of physician to patient communication in the effort to reduce medical misinformation [5].

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Older demographics may particularly benefit from an increase in physician activity on social media. While the proportion of social media users is lowest among those aged 65 years and older, with less than half of the age group being active on social media, older adults are most likely to share medical misinformation among any age group [11, 1]. Meanwhile, older patients report the greatest amount of trust for their physicians compared to young adults [6]. By increasing the proportion of physicians and nurses who provide basic medical information or demonstrate support for important public health causes on social media, older patients who trust their physicians will likely encounter more accurate medical information, and simultaneously decrease their engagement with medical fallacy. Subsequently, the impact of these fake new sites at large would be reduced, since social media algorithms typically only boost posts to a wider population of users when they have high levels of engagement [8]. 

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Another commonly recognized benefit of social media is its efficiency in sharing information across wide populations. In 2023, it is estimated that 4.9 billion people use social media around the world [11]. Given that the average person spends 145 minutes on social media a day, this would amount to 5.7 years spent on social media platforms over a typical lifespan of 73 years [11]. Social media platforms are designed to condense as much information as possible into limited amounts of time, with the free version of Twitter barring tweets that exceed the 280-character word limit and TikTok restricting videos to 10 minutes or less. Social media is also designed to hook users; terms like “doom scrolling” and “YouTube deep dives,” which describe prolonged periods of constant information consumption, capture the addictive nature of social media. Further, the development of language translation systems has also propagated the exchange of information across international borders. The growing prominence of social media as a news outlet, combined with its unique design for rapid and widespread information consumption, makes it a valuable platform for physicians and nurses to correct medical misinformation. 

 

As much as social media is praised for its extensive outreach, it is important to recognize certain demographic differences in social media usage which can account for an unequal distribution of information. For one, individuals from lower socioeconomic groups are more likely to accept health misinformation [3], making them an important target to provide accurate medical information. However, being from a lower income group is also correlated with less social media use [9]. Similarly, individuals with lower educational levels are at a greater risk of trusting medical misinformation, yet only about 60% of individuals with a high school education or less are active on at least one social media site [9]. Essentially, while providing clarity on health information to individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds or lower educational levels could significantly mitigate the spread of medical misinformation, social media may not be the most effective network through which to connect with these individuals. Instead, encouraging live interactions between physicians and nurses and patients, whether during annual checkups or public speaker events, could make a greater impact on reducing medical misinformation within these demographics.