I’m a 3rd year medical student and I’ve already been caught off-guard a few times by the WILD medical misinformation my patients talk about, and figured that I should probably get ahead of it so that I can have some kind of response prepared. (Or know what the hell they’ve OD’d on or taken that is interfering with their actual medications)
I’m setting up a dummy tablet with a new account that isn’t tied to me in any reasonable way to collect medical misinformation from. I’m looking at adding tik tok, instagram, twitter, reddit, and facebook accounts to train the algorithms to show medical misinformation. Are there any other social media apps or websites I should add to scrape for medical misinformation?
Also, any pointers on which accounts to look for on those apps to get started? I have an instagram account for my artwork and one for sharing accurate medical information, but I’ve trained my personal algorithm to not show me all the complete bullshit for the sake of my blood pressure. (And I have never used tik tok before, so I have no goddamn clue how that app works)
It hurts my soul that this is actually a good addition.
Be aware that when you seek out medical disinfo on social media, you don’t just increase its visibility in your own feed, but in everyone else’s as well.
One account in the milieu isn’t going to make that much of a difference.
Search for health and they don’t want you to know or doctors don’t want you to know.
That will be a good downtime activity, but I also want to know what the algorithms are shoveling.
The more you engage with a type of post the more they will give yo that type of post so go on tiktok or threads and just engage with a bunch of them and you will see more of it but just know that especially by engaging you will actively be worsening misinformation. I know you said 1: million doesn’t matter but especially if you are looking for source material your initial engagement could easily cause a post that would otherwise stay in those mini cults to get spread
My wife is a Rheumatologist. She actually had a patient attempt to use an article SHE WROTE to argue against her diagnosis. The article the patient was “citing” was not even applicable to the symptoms the patient presented.
Just search any symptom and add to it “home remedies” what ever will come will probably include medical misinformation.
That covers some things, but the algorithm feeds people such nonsense at such a high rate that it’s hard to keep up with.
To train your algorithms you’ll have to do a whole bunch of manual searches at first.
Go on Facebook, look up and type any illness + cure
I wonder if there is a list of Joe Rogan guests or an AI summary of the episodes. Also, Snopes covers a lot and won’t rot your brain.
I’ll be looking into free versions of Chat GPT and the like. And I like the idea of AI summaries of Joe Rogan because I don’t think I could actually listen to him without having an actual aneurysm.
I got you.
Any pyramid scheme that has anything to do with food or health. Their books are troves of made-up shit. Sometimes they’ll say true things (i.e. highly processed foods are less nutritious than whole foods), but then tell you to eat highly processed food five times a day.
They’ll have several hour-long meetings where they talk about how the magic crystals, protein bar, or energy shake is changing their life.
Their websites are fucking whack-a-doodle. There’s usually one quack with an MD rubber-stamping, fabricating, and/or misrepresenting evidence.
Facebook, tiktok, insta. Influencer girls promoting their own products, mineral stones, etc. Groups with conservatives, old people, MAGA, right wing extremists, hippies, yoga guru’s, basically any group with low IQ people who feel hurt and claim a monopoly on the truth. Truth social could be great too. And religious groups of course.
Truth social is one I hadn’t thought of. I should also look into getting on an emailing list from Goop.
They both should have associated accounts across multiple social media sites.
That’s actually super helpful. I’ll need a few “content creators” to seed the dummy account with.
Dunno what type of tablet you’ve got but Apple News is pretty solidly loaded with medical fear mongering that’s sanewashed via being from interviews with “experts.”
Buzzfeed, Newsweek, HuffPost, etc. are your main name-brand culprits. Other magazines/websites also push this garbage but it’s a little more obvious.
Other key words across social media would probably be “nutritionist,” “coach,” “guru,” and other catchy terms that basically mean unlicensed. I’ve never used TikTok but when I was on Instagram years ago those were the biggest offenders.
Signing up for emailing lists is probably a good place to start. I also accidentally subscribed to an RFK apologist Substack when it was recommending health-related writers to me.
4chan comes to mind. /fit/ would probably have a bunch of BS for you to trawl, /ck/ will probably have dietary misinfo, maybe /sci/ as well.
That will actually be helpful towards the weird stuff that men get into in addition to wholly unnecessary “hormone replacement therapy” (aka juicing on steroids)
Instagram reels and TikTok are filled to the brim with medical misinformation.
You may enjoy Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine. They do a lot of history stuff but as time has gone on it has more and more been about current events, exploring the history and science behind these grifts. Not exactly what you’re asking for, but Dr. Sydnee is one of my leftist role models and I think they do great work to identify and explain these things to laypeople.
This looks like a great recommendation, thank you!
