Medical misinformation and social media

he current hysteria about ‘social media’ in the mainstream press parallels the hysteria in the science press about ‘misinfor­mation.’ In both cases, establishment information providers are attacking the competition. As always, the principal target is social media.

Misinfor­mation has a simple cure: stop lying. Make correct information easily available instead of blocking access to it with paywalls and expensive subscriptions. Kids are broke and they don’t trust the mainstream media to tell the truth. Here’s a news flash for web managers: if you’re behind a paywall, you’re competing with TikTok—and losing.

You don't have to produce a TikTok video with words popping up and jumping around, but if you block kids from reading the truth, you can’t complain when they don’t.

‘Censorship’ of science

A letter ^[1] by Wen-Ying Sylvia Chou in the Journal of Medical Internet Research expresses the views of many left-wingers in science. Chou had a grant terminated for reasons she doesn’t disclose. She says fear of ‘retribution’ by the US government leads to self-censorship.

If you censor yourself out of fear of President Trump, it means one of three things: (1) you’re revealing classified information; (2) you’re straying into politics; or (3) you’ve gone nuts. Whatever was the reason, she proposes some good points:

When a health topic becomes politicized, traditional campaigns and messaging may be too late to be effective. We need to confront and shift the public discourse. We can start with facilitating meaningful conversations—creating opportunities such as a third place for dialogue, building common ground across disparate silos, and allowing disagreement while maintaining civility.

This is good advice. The medical and scientific community should make a strong effort to stop demonizing information they think is false. They should investigate claims made by nonscientists before dismissing them out of hand. The beauty of science is that authors must disclose their evidence and reasoning. But not everything in the scientific literature is true. It is not a repository of proven facts and using it as a metric for ‘misinfor­mation’ is inappropriate.

The problem is that once something shows up in a scientific paper, it’s taken as gospel. Unlike social media posts, which can be deleted easily, it’s very difficult to erase it. Take the misinfor­mation the medical community fed to the public for decades about nutrition. Some people still believe eggs are harmful. Others still believe that eating even small amounts of fat will give them cardiovascular disease. It’s virtually impossible to get beef at the grocery store that has not been carefully trimmed to render it virtually tasteless. This might explain the muted reaction to the current beef shortage: the crap they sell was already mostly inedible.

Chou may believe her work has been censored, but it’s hard to be sympathetic when there are thousands of ordinary citizens, doctors, and scientists whose views, often based on sound evidence, have been ridiculed, censored, and dismissed by academics and in the media. The phrase “what goes around comes around” comes to mind.

We need the science establishment to ruthlessly exclude politics. The abolition of woke and DEI ideology from federal institutions was an important first step. The CDC was drifting into politics, defining racism and atmospheric CO₂ as public health problems. NIH was funding grants to support DEI and brutally harassing any employee who questioned it. This was killing the freedom of thought that is essential to science. We must avoid mixing politics with science at all costs. A little self-censorship, or what used to be called discretion, might go a long way.

Social media

A perfect example of misinfor­mation is the current hysteria over children and social media. Australia has already banned children from social media; the UK and Canada are following suit. Is the concern genuine or is it orchestrated by the mainstream news media? It’s no secret that the MSM are hemorrhaging readers. The online media are also evidently in trouble, as evidenced by their constant whining about ‘ad-blockers’ and the proliferation of paywalls. So they criticize social media “for the children.”

We must be skeptical when the news media and discussion boards claim that scientists say social media use is harmful to mental health. In fact, the evidence is mixed and publication bias is rampant. If you discovered that social media exposure was harmless or beneficial, it means your results did not reach statistical significance. But why? Reason: your sample size was ‘too small’. Your paper gets rejected.

That is what Big Pharma did in their multi-billion dollar gamble to get their beta-amyloid anti-Alzheimer immunotherapy through the FDA: each time they got a negative result, they doubled the population size and reran the trial. When they finally got the p-value below 0.05, they stopped. In any other context this would be called p-hacking.

The same is true about social media harm. If you make the population big enough and toss out enough outliers, you can prove anything.

Cardiovascular disease and sunscreen

The BMJ claims ^[2] that misin­for­mation on cardio­vascular disease is spreading through social media. The only specific example they gave was a tweet saying reducing salt could be bad for your health, something that is obviously true.

Basil cells

At the moment there’s also a big push to convince us that TikTok is full of misin­for­mation about sunscreen. One paper ^[3] claims that articles with misinfor­mation were less than 2% of the total but got more clicks, and that this is a problem. Their credibility is slightly undermined by an amusing typo (human skin doesn’t have “Basil cells”).

What these papers (and hundreds more like it) have in common is that people are unhappy that posters on social media are challenging their version of the truth. Perhaps more importantly, they’re also outcompeting them for clicks. It is certainly true that some Internet ‘experts’ deliberately misinterpret scientific papers. They’re doing it for political gain and they should be challenged. But we depend on the government to be impartial. By misrepre­senting political objectives as scientific truths, they invited—arguably mandated—ordinary citizens to refute them.

As I said to one Trump-hating relative, the Democrats created Trump. The CDC and NIH created RFK Jr. and now they will have to live with him. If they were smart, they would stop resisting.

jul 06 2026, 9:40 am