Even as misinformation proliferates across the Internet, sites containing low-credibility health information remain relatively scarce and unseen.
That’s according to new research from University of Utah communication scholars who tracked web-surfing activities of more than 1,000 U.S. adults for four weeks. But the findings, published in Nature Aging, illuminate a dark side. Traffic to such sites is concentrated heavily among older adults, especially among those who lean right politically.
This indicates the most vulnerable population is the most likely to be exposed to potentially harmful health-related information online, according to lead author Ben Lyons, an associate professor in the Department of Communication.
Good news with a catch
“It’s sort of good news, though. Overall, the levels are pretty low,” Lyons said, emphasizing that it’s still a small number of people, young and old, who are drawn to dubious medical information while surfing the web. “Not all older adults are like this, but the outliers are concentrated among older adults.”
Prior research by Lyons and others has established that older Americans are more likely to engage with and share political misinformation. To investigate whether this is also true for health information as well, Lyons and his colleagues, Andy King and Kimberly Kaphingst, collaborated with the U’s School of Medicine and Huntsman Cancer Institute.
They found that older folks do not generally engage with questionable health information on the same scale as they do with partisan political content.
“The age effect is way bigger for politics,” Lyons said. “People see politics as way more entertaining than they would health-related content. So there’s less of a motivation to want to share these things. You don’t get a feeling of team identity from sharing health misinformation like you would for information that puts down your political opponents.”
Analyzing 9 million page views
To conduct the study, the team analyzed both survey results and actual web-browsing and YouTube-viewing data. The survey data were gathered via questionnaires midway through the four-week study period.
During this period, the participants landed on about 9 million URLs, including 500,000 YouTube videos, according to the trace data. Lyons and King coded the websites for health content, separating those by commercial and informational content. Of the 1,055 domains categorized with the health tag, just 78 or 6.8% trafficked in low-credibility health information.
Only 13% of participants visited even one such site during the four-week period, and those visits made up just 3% of all health-related browsing.
But the exposure was highly concentrated in a small group of people. The top 10% of participants accounted for more than three-quarters of all visits to low-credibility health sites.
Since older adults have more health burdens and make more medical decisions, they tend to spend more time seeking out health information online. It would naturally follow that they may be more likely to be exposed to medical misinformation, so the researchers examined the ratios of visits involving low-credibility information. They found these ratios to be much higher for older adults.
“Most people are not visiting these kinds of websites,” Lyons stressed. “Visits are pretty rare overall, but the sort of patterns we’ve seen in numerous trace-data studies tend to be replicated here. It’s older adults, in particular, those who consume more right-leaning partisan news. We wouldn’t necessarily hypothesize that from the get-go.”
How Internet users wind up on websites with low-credibility information
This aspect of the findings surprised Lyons’s team, which explored the “referral” sites, the ones that directed the user to URLs with low-credibility health information, to see what was driving this traffic.
“Are people going through Google search, or are they being referred through Facebook? We’re not really seeing that in this data,” Lyons said. “We’re also not seeing people being referred through partisan news media, even though that is a correlate. What we found, at least in the referral data, is that it’s a more insular type of thing. They’re visiting these because they visit other low-credibility sites, they’re clicking through, and they’re spending more time on these sites. They’re going to them directly.”
In another finding, the team discovered people who already believed false health claims or had more conspiratorial views were more likely to encounter dubious health content, indicating exposure isn’t random.
This study suggests that improving online health information environments and helping people better evaluate what they encounter may be especially important for seniors. At the same time, the findings show this isn’t just a “health misinformation” problem, but rather something tied to broader patterns of how people navigate the internet, which makes solutions more complicated.
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