Maintenance Notice

Due to necessary scheduled maintenance, the JMIR Publications website will be unavailable from Wednesday, July 01, 2020 at 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM EST. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Who will be affected?

Previously submitted to: JMIR Infodemiology (no longer under consideration since May 13, 2026)

Date Submitted: Jan 5, 2026

Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.

Detecting Health Misinformation on Social Media Using Large Language Models: A Comparative Study of Vaccine and Tanning Discourse on Reddit

  • Jack Alexander Cummins; 
  • Vinod E Nambudiri

ABSTRACT

By applying Large Language Models to analyze Reddit discourse, this study demonstrates that vaccine misinformation is highly reactive to external events like the COVID-19 pandemic, whereas tanning misinformation remains culturally entrenched and stable, highlighting the necessity for domain-specific public health interventions.


 Citation

Please cite as:

Cummins JA, Nambudiri VE

Detecting Health Misinformation on Social Media Using Large Language Models: A Comparative Study of Vaccine and Tanning Discourse on Reddit

JMIR Preprints. 05/01/2026:90833

DOI: 10.2196/preprints.90833

URL: https://preprints.jmir.org/preprint/90833

Download PDF


Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.

© 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.