After Meta nixes fact-checking, experts urge health systems to take action

Meta is walking back its fact-checking efforts, Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, said in a January 7 post on the company’s website, raising concerns about the potential for health misinformation to increase on its social platforms.

Kaplan explained that over the next few months, Meta will phase out and replace its third-party fact-checking program—in place since 2016—with a community notes model, à la X, across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Through this model, users can identify and add disclaimers to posts with misinformation, and other users’ votes determine whether the note will be shown next to the original post.

While Kaplan said the move encourages “free expression,” experts say it should be a wake-up call for healthcare organizations. Multiple studies conclude that health misinformation on the internet has decreased trust in conventional treatments like vaccines.

For instance, a 2021 randomized controlled trial published in journal Nature Human Behavior suggested that some people were less willing to take a Covid-19 vaccine after viewing online misinformation. The portion of those “definitely” willing as of September 2020 was only 43% in the US. A 2022 study from Indiana University, published in Scientific Reports, also linked lower vaccine uptake to higher exposure to online misinformation.

The healthcare industry needs to take an active role in combatting misinfo, Geeta Nayyar, physician, healthcare strategist, and author of Dead Wrong: Diagnosing and Treating Healthcare’s Misinformation Illness, told Healthcare Brew.

“We cannot rely on the social media companies to do the right thing by patients and consumers, and we as healthcare leaders need to take this issue on as a priority,” she added.

The big picture

Irving Washington, executive director and SVP of KFF’s Health Information and Trust Initiative, told Healthcare Brew via email that he was unsure what the impacts of Meta’s decision would be.

“Meta’s move from professional fact-checking to Community Notes raises questions about whether this change will make health information more reliable or make it harder for users to figure out what they can trust,” Washington wrote.

On one hand, a March 2024 JAMA research letter from scientists at the University of California, San Diego suggests that X’s method still resulted in quality fact-checking. The scientists reviewed Community Notes on posts with Covid-19 vaccine misinformation and found the notes were accurate and cited reputable sources.

But Nayyar is concerned that this method makes it “that much harder” for consumers to trust what’s online, compared to Meta’s old strategy, which involved things like employing fact-checkers and deprioritizing incorrect posts on people’s feeds.

Seeking solutions

One solution, according to the Surgeon General’s Community Toolkit for Addressing Health Misinformation, is for health professionals to proactively educate patients and use technology to spread accurate information.

Brian Southwell, a distinguished fellow at nonprofit research institute RTI International, pointed to the need for scientists to develop their communication skills and for universities and newsrooms to provide credible information to community members.

“Whether or not a social media platform opts to fact-check user posts is only part of a larger puzzle we face in our information environment,” Southwell told Healthcare Brew.

A May 2023 meta-analysis in Nature Human Behavior of 74 reports suggests that “on average,” attempts to debunk scientific misinformation with corrections weren’t successful. Corrections were more likely to work in certain circumstances, though: when they were detailed, when readers were already somewhat knowledgeable about the topic, and when the issue wasn’t politically polarized.

Nayyar said systems should get ahead of misinformation by creating their own media.

She pointed to Cleveland Clinic, which boasts a YouTube channel with 600,000+ followers and 5,000+ videos. The videos range from warning signs of certain cancers to advice on how to keep kids safe from RSV. Some of the videos also explain the procedures that the healthcare system offers and introduce viewers to its doctors. Other systems, like Northwell Health, have gone so far as to open a film studio to promote their brand.

Nayyar argues that investing resources to educate patients will pay off in the end by encouraging them to visit providers more frequently. Creating content to educate patients on preventative breast cancer care, for instance, will send them into the doctor’s office for regular mammograms.

“There’s a fantastic business case for why healthcare leaders should make taking on this issue of mis- and disinformation a priority,” she said.