In the era of viral content and rapid and furious communication of social media, disinformation and disinformation, including on health issues, spread more widely than ever. Why is it exactly the case, and how can we learn to identify inaccurate and even malicious health information? Why do we fall so easily for information on false health and how can we update our erroneous beliefs? These are some of the questions that these episodes aim to answer.
Nowadays, thanks to the widespread availability of internet access, almost all the information we may wish is only a click. Although this is, on the whole, positive development, this can also mean that we become exposed to unreliable and uncontrolled information on all subjects, including health.
According to a report Emitted by the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPE) in 2024, communication experts are currently the most concerned about “threats to the information environment posed by owners of social media platforms”.
These platforms regularly circulate to a varied range of videos, articles and publications on subjects, including health. However, in the absence of strict rules and regulations concerning information shared on social networks, there is a clear danger that at least part of what we see being shared online is equivalent to disinformation or even a disinformation.
Disinformation The communication is responsible for inaccuracies, either because the original information has been misinterpreted or poorly understood, or because someone has picked up erroneous information by mistake and continued to share them.
Disinformation is an even more worrying phenomenon. It occurs when a bad actor distributes false information, in order to manipulate their audience to support a hidden agenda.
In this episode of In conversationWe examine why the disinformation of health and disinformation propagate, how we can identify bad and disinformation, and what people need to update their point of view after having assimilated incorrect information.
Our special guest is Prof. Stephan Lewandowsky,,President of Cognitive Psychology of the School of Psychological Science, University of Bristol, United Kingdom and project manager Produminfo (Protect the space of democratic information in Europe) at the University of Potsdam in Germany.
Professor Lewandowsky is a cognitive scientist who is interested in computer modeling that has studied decision -making processes, the persistence of disinformation in society, the ways that myths and disinformation can spread and how people put up to date their memories if the notions they believe to believe and people turned false.
We also hear our own trusted expert, Dr Jenny YuDirector of Health at Medical news today And HealthlineAdvise on key strategies to ensure that we access the most precise and reliable sources of health information.
Please listen to our entire episode of podcast below or on your favorite streaming platform.