Malki, lisa;
Patel, Dilisha;
Singh, aneesha;
(2024)
“The Headline Was So Wild That I Had To Check”: An Exploration of Women’s Encounters With Health Misinformation on Social Media.
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
10.1145/3637405.
(In press).
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Abstract
Misinformation has emerged as a significant threat to public health in recent years and has been observed across numerous health issues, the most prolific being COVID-19. Though increasing attention has been paid to women’s health within the social scientific and HCI communities, very little research has holistically explored the unique challenges women face when navigating health misinformation. To address this gap, we conducted a qualitative diary and interview study aimed at investigating women’s perceptions and lived experiences of health misinformation on social media, and how they respond emotionally and behaviourally to health misinformation encountered in their day-to-day lives. We found that participants perceived health misinformation as ubiquitous and poorly-managed by social media platforms, resulting in a lack of trust in current moderation and fact-checking interventions. We also observed that encounters with misinformation triggered negative emotional responses, which participants attempted to navigate through ad-hoc strategies such as drawing on personal experience and reading social media comment sections, which facilitated collective sensemaking. We discuss our findings in relation to the design of targeted interventions which empower women to engage constructively with health information on social media. In particular, we underscore the importance of trust, accountability, and intersectionality in future design and research practice, and encourage a holistic view of how women are impacted by misinformation.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | “The Headline Was So Wild That I Had To Check”: An Exploration of Women’s Encounters With Health Misinformation on Social Media |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1145/3637405 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1145/3637405 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2023 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). This is an open access article under the CC BY 4.0 license Attribution 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) |
| Keywords: | Misinformation, social media, women’s health, sensemaking |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10186863 |
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