Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
The Content-Quality of Urological Malignancies on Pinterest
ABSTRACT
Background:
Pinterest is a visually oriented social media platform with over 250 million monthly users. Previous studies have found misinformative content on genitourinary (GU) malignancies to be broadly disseminated on YouTube; however, no study has assessed its quality on Pinterest.
Objective:
Our objective was to evaluate the quality, understandability, and actionability of GU malignancy content on Pinterest.
Methods:
We examined 540 Pinterest posts/pins using the search terms: “bladder cancer,” “kidney cancer,” “prostate cancer,” and “testicular cancer.” The pins were limited to English-language and topic specific content, resulting in the following exclusions: bladder (n=88), kidney (n=4), prostate (n=79), and testicular cancer (n=10), leaving 359 pins as the final analytic sample. Pinterest pins were classified based on publisher and perceived race/ethnicity. Content was assessed using two validated grading systems: DISCERN quality criteria and the Patient Education Materials Assessment Tool (PEMAT). The presence of misinformation was evaluated using a published Likert scale, ranging from 1=none to 5=high.
Results:
Overall, 359 pins with a total of 8,507 repins were evaluated. The primary publisher of GU malignancies pins were health and wellness groups (45%) (Table 1). Across all GU malignancy pins with people, only 3% were perceived as black. Additionally, Asian (1%) and Latinx (0.5%) individuals were underrepresented in all pins. Nearly 75% of pins had moderate to poor quality information. Misinformative content was apparent in 4%-26% of all GU cancer pins. Understandability and actionability were poor in 55% and 100% pins, respectively.
Conclusions:
On Pinterest, the majority of the urological oncology patient-centric content is low quality and lacks diversity. This widely used, yet unregulated platform has the ability to influence consumers health knowledge and decision-making. Ultimately, this can lead to consumers making suboptimal medical decisions. Moreover, our findings demonstrate underrepresentation across many racial and ethnic groups. Efforts should be made to ensure the dissemination of diverse, high-quality, and accurate healthcare information to the millions of users on Pinterest and other social media platforms.
Citation
