16
columnist/ deconstructing pseudoscience
The HEALTH | APRIL, 2018
From non-science to nonsense:
Is the health
information on social
media truly legit?
O
N my Facebook wall at the time
of writing this piece, I searched
for the words “cancer cure” and
found a total of 20 posts; of
which only four had any kind of
factual basis. The rest had no grounding
in science whatsoever; including one
on “how eating lemons are better than
chemotherapy in curing cancer” and the
discovery of an “Australian berry which
apparently can cure cancer in 48 hours”.
Not forgetting of course, the conspiracy
theory making its rounds on Facebook
and WhatsApp that… “the cure for
cancer has been found and is being
suppressed by big pharma companies.”
F
EATURES such
as these as well
and others have
become com-
monplace on our
social media pages
today; as evidenced by the search
of my own daily feed. Today,
social media has become one of
the main ways for us to access any
sort of information. The Digital
News Report 2017 by the Reuters
Institute for the Study of Journal-
ism at Oxford University found
that 58 per cent of Malaysians use
Facebook while 51 per cent use
WhatsApp as their main source
to find, share or discuss news.
The availability of health
information through social media
has always been welcomed by the
health fraternity, as it was thought
social media would act as an infor-
mation equaliser of sorts; allowing
people who could easily get a lot
of health information to now enjoy
that much more access at a touch
of a button via the Internet. Well….
that’s not been working out so well.
The reason? One of the big
problems with social media
information is establishing the
credibility of its information.
While traditional media sources
like television and the newspa-
pers were always bound by laws
to report the truth (or the truth
as closely as they saw it), social
media, as it began growing by
leaps and bounds, was like the
Wild Wild West. Anyone could
post anything sort of informa-
tion; and this quickly became
the case, including where many
people now found good business
opportunities for buying and
selling health products which are
most times of unknown quality
or efficacy— online. Add to this
RESOURCE
BY
DR MURALLITHARAN
M.
groups of ‘conspiracy theorists’,
‘new-age health’ proponents and
other groups who shun ‘modern
medicine’ and what you have
via social media is a whole lot of
health information which may or
may not be true as seen by my own
Facebook feed in which only 20 per
cent of news was actually true.
We have now clearly estab-
lished that there’s good health
information and bad health
information out there. So what,
you may ask? The person reading
the health information should be
able to distinguish between true
information which is credible or
one that consist of pure nonsense.
Shouldn’t they? That might be
something which is very debate-
able. One very interesting study
found that people found social
media news sources to be more
credible — trustworthy and thus,
true—based on how much and how
frequently it was updated; and its
cognitive elaboration. Cognitive
elaboration simply means the
DESCRIPTION
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ A website which investigates and classifies science news
including in health
https://www.factcheck.org/scicheck/ A website that classifies media bias and fake news. You can
put in the website url that was shared as the source or just the
name of the organisation/website will also do
https://www.factcheck.org/socheck/ FactCheck’s SciCheck section focuses on science questions
which can be forwarded to the team and they will respond as
well as post the query and its answers on the website
https://sebenarnya.my/ Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission’s
information verification portal-focuses on Malaysia based
news
https://www.poynter.org/international-fact-
checking-network-fact-checkers-code-principles An international network of fact-checking organisation with
links to individual sites – focusing on different languages
ability of a person to form asso-
ciations between new information
and prior knowledge they already
have within their minds. This
study simply meant that people
trusted news on social media
when it was updated more often
and it jived with what information
they already knew. In many cases,
this has been used to manipulate
and distort understanding and
provide untrue health informa-
tion to unsuspecting readers on
social media; convincing them to
do things which are both based in
non-science and sometimes, pure
nonsense.
A complete example is shown
in the shark box above.
What can we do? To paraphrase
a famous saying, “Seeing is most
definitely not equal to believing.”
Rather, health information or news
which you get from social media
should be checked to determine
whether it is true or not. This
can be done from the suggested
resources in the box at the bottom.
So next time you see a Facebook
post or get a WhatsApp message
on some health information that
looks suspicious or too good to
be true like “lemons cure cancer”,
just stop one minute before you
click the LIKE or SHARE button
or forward it to another WhatsApp
group. Verify whether it’s truly
science or nonsense!
Dr Murallitharan M. is a public
health physician and the National
Cancer Society of Malaysia medical
director.
He can be reached by email at
muralli cancer.org.my or visit www.
cancer.org.my