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Health misinformation or not? information evaluative strategies among older social media users
Date Issued
2022
Citation
Chang, L., Xin, X., Li, W., & Wang, J. (11-15 Jul 2022). Health misinformation or not? information evaluative strategies among older social media users. International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) 2022, Beijing, China.
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Social media includes different forms of channels and tools using Web 2.0 technologies that allow the creation and circulation of user-generated content. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter ease user access to a vast amount of information. However, their limited control over content production and dissemination also put users at risk of exposure to misinformation. This raises the concern of social media users’ ability to discern trustworthy health information from unreliable one in online environments. Past studies suggest that older social media users are more likely to engage with fake news sources and share fake news than younger users (Grinberg et al., 2019; Guess et al., 2019). A better understanding of older social media users’ information evaluative strategies and how they use the acquired information to guide health self-management is urgently needed.
Metzger and colleagues proposed the systematic-heuristic model to examine individuals’ information evaluative strategies (Metzger et al., 2010; Metzger & Flanagin, 2013). The model holds that individuals may rely on cognitive heuristics, i.e., mental shortcuts or other effortless cognitive resources, to make quick decisions or use information quality cues to perform rigorous evaluation. Guided by this analytical framework, our study explored two research questions: (1) How do older adults evaluate the credibility of health information on social media; and (2) How do older adults respond to dubious health information on social media?
Using an in-depth interview design, we collected data from 40 social media users aged 65 or above (M = 71.75, SD = 6.65) in a major southern city of China. Participants were asked about their use of WeChat, a dominant social media app in China, to acquire health- related information and their strategies to process ambiguous health information.
Performed in MAXQDA Analytics Pro 2020 software, thematic analysis identified two overarching themes: evaluative heuristics and adaptive behaviors.
The first theme revealed five cognitive heuristics that participants used to evaluate the credibility of health information on WeChat. These strategies included assessing the perceived communicative orientation of the source (communicative orientation heuristic); the exaggeration of a message’s claimed effects (magic effect heuristic); the consistency of informational contents across sources (consistency heuristic); the resonance of informational contents with personal life experience and past knowledge (self-confirmation heuristic); and the reputation of the information source (reputation heuristic).
The second theme identified four adaptive styles in response to ambiguous health information on WeChat. The avoidants, which represented the majority of participants, resisted health misinformation by ignoring all dubious information without further factchecking. The researchers looked for credible sources such as medical books, health
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authorities, and doctors to confirm information credibility. The sharers posted ambiguous information in chat groups comprising family members and friends to alert or discuss with others. The adventurers tested the veracity of information, particularly that about diet and physical activity, by trial and error. The findings of participants’ preferred use of cognitive heuristics for credibility assessment resonate with past research and provide additional insights into older social media users’ information evaluative strategies.
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