I’m a 3rd year medical student and I’ve already been caught off-guard a few times by the WILD medical misinformation my patients talk about, and figured that I should probably get ahead of it so that I can have some kind of response prepared. (Or know what the hell they’ve OD’d on or taken that is interfering with their actual medications)
I’m setting up a dummy tablet with a new account that isn’t tied to me in any reasonable way to collect medical misinformation from. I’m looking at adding tik tok, instagram, twitter, reddit, and facebook accounts to train the algorithms to show medical misinformation. Are there any other social media apps or websites I should add to scrape for medical misinformation?
Also, any pointers on which accounts to look for on those apps to get started? I have an instagram account for my artwork and one for sharing accurate medical information, but I’ve trained my personal algorithm to not show me all the complete bullshit for the sake of my blood pressure. (And I have never used tik tok before, so I have no goddamn clue how that app works)
Dunno what type of tablet you’ve got but Apple News is pretty solidly loaded with medical fear mongering that’s sanewashed via being from interviews with “experts.”
Buzzfeed, Newsweek, HuffPost, etc. are your main name-brand culprits. Other magazines/websites also push this garbage but it’s a little more obvious.
Other key words across social media would probably be “nutritionist,” “coach,” “guru,” and other catchy terms that basically mean unlicensed. I’ve never used TikTok but when I was on Instagram years ago those were the biggest offenders.
Signing up for emailing lists is probably a good place to start. I also accidentally subscribed to an RFK apologist Substack when it was recommending health-related writers to me.