Previously submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research (no longer under consideration since Dec 12, 2023)
Date Submitted: Mar 3, 2023
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Disinformation about diet and nutrition in social media. Scoping review
ABSTRACT
Social networks have played an essential role in the dissemination of nutrition-related information for years.
Objective:
to conduct a review of the international literature on the use of social media in relation to diet and nutrition disinformation. Method: A search was conducted in the following databases: Medline, Web of Science and Scopus. The time frame of this study encompassed articles published from 1st of January 2017 to 13th of December 2022. The search queries were based on the following word structures: Diet ("diet" or "nutrition" OR "nutrition facts"), Information management ("misinformation" OR "disinformation"), Social media ("Twitter" OR "TikTok" OR "Instagram" OR "YouTube" OR "Facebook"). Inclusion criteria were as follows: i) articles written in English, ii) articles published in a peer-reviewed journal, iii) articles that clearly provide the methodology and results, iv) articles in which the researchers used Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, or Facebook to obtain the results, v) articles published from 1st of January 2017 to 1st December 2022. Exclusion criteria were defined as i) non-research articles (editorial letters, comments, pre-prints, abstracts, proceedings, book reviews, etc.), ii) articles not focused on disinformation, iii) articles focused on social networks not listed in the inclusion criteria.
Results:
A total of 28 articles were included in our review. The most common social media were Instagram and YouTube, with 100% of the articles presenting some form of misinformation. In many cases, the aim was to achieve relevance rather than truthfulness. More specifically, 17 of the articles analyzed advocated miracle diets as a cure for diseases, without any scientific basis. These articles included a large number of diseases such as gout, acne, or orthorexia. Conclusion: Institutions should address misinformation when it poses a threat to public health. Since this is not happening, it is important that healthcare professionals identify themselves as such in social networks and start sharing their knowledge in these new media
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.