An Examination of Factors Contributing to the Acceptance of Online Health Misinformation

Abstract

This study examined factors including health-related anxiety, preexisting misinformation beliefs, and repeated exposure contributing to individuals’ acceptance of health misinformation. Through a large-scale online survey, this study found that health-related anxiety was positively associated with health misinformation acceptance. Preexisting misinformation beliefs, as well as repeated exposure to health misinformation, were both positively associated with health misinformation acceptance. The results also showed that demographic variables were significantly associated with health misinformation acceptance. In general, females accepted more health misinformation compared to males. Participants’ age was negatively associated with health misinformation acceptance. Participants’ education level and income were both negatively associated with their acceptance of health misinformation.

A Review of Misinformation Across Disciplines: Implication for Online Education

“…For example, people of color accepted more misinformation than white people. [4,42] offered an examination of factors contributing to the acceptance of online health misinformation). Lower socioeconomic status, older age, and lower educational level groups are also disproportionally impacted by misinformation [48].…”

“…It is worthy to mention that among the results found by this line of research, studies also have shown contradictory results. For example, some study argued that males tend to trust misinformation more than females [48], while other study contended that females accepted more health misinformation than their male counterparts [42].…”

“…The field of misinformation is growing. Misinformation research has been growing rapidly drastically specially on topics such as COVID 19 [2, 4, Basch et al, 2021;48], vaccine [Basch et al, 2021;9, Kendeou et al, 2019, 49], climate change [13,16,36], medical concerns [56], communication [8], memory [22], cognitive impacts on reading [45], new literacies [11], online education [9], political studies [11,1], and diversity [42] etc.…”

Text Analysis Methods for Misinformation–Related Research on Finnish Language Twitter

“…Social media is regarded as a powerful global medium that influences people's perceptions of the world and their role in it [31]. Social media has raised critical concerns as context due to its popularity [3] as well as the rapid spread of fake news, thus causing potentially detrimental effects both on individuals and society [17,32]. In particular, the rapid spread of false information on Twitter has caused concern [3,17,18].…”

A Review of Misinformation Across Disciplines: Implication for Online Education

“…The field of misinformation is growing. Misinformation research has been growing rapidly on topics such as COVID 19 [2,4,48], vaccine [6; 9, 30, 49], climate change [13,16,36], medical concerns [56], communication [8], memory [22], cognitive impacts on reading [45], new literacies [11], online education [9], political studies [11,1], and diversity [42] etc.…”