JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

When facing a health decision, people tend to seek and access online information and other resources. Unfortunately, this exposes them to a substantial volume of misinformation. Misinformation, when combined with growing public distrust of science and trust in alternative medicine, may motivate people to make suboptimal choices that lead to harmful health outcomes and threaten public safety. Identifying harmful misinformation is complicated. Current definitions of misinformation either have limited capacity to define harmful health misinformation inclusively or present a complex framework with information characteristics that users cannot easily evaluate. Building on the previous taxonomies and definitions, we propose an information evaluation framework that focuses on defining different shapes and forms of harmful health misinformation. The framework aims to help health information users including researchers, clinicians, policymakers, and lay individuals, to detect misinformation that threatens informed and preference-concordant health decision making.