GIN – “Gesund im Netz”: Identifying trustworthy health information on social media

More and more people, especially young people, are obtaining information about health issues via social media instead of other traditional media. Misinformation on social media is a serious problem and many people have difficulties in assessing the trustworthiness of health information on the internet. We have recently developed a checklist for assessing the reliability of online health information for lay people. However, this has only been tested for use with websites and cannot be used for social media in its current form. Therefore, in the proposed research project we would like to focus on health information on social media and how to assess its trustworthiness. Together with so-called "Citizen Scientists", we want to work out how the target group (i.e. people who obtain health information from social media) assesses the trustworthiness of the information. And in the next step, we would like to develop and validate criteria derived from the literature and from our own qualitative results, which can be used to assess the trustworthiness of social media health information. In the third step, we would like to disseminate the results via social media in cooperation with the Citizen Scientists.