Medical misinformation and social media

he current hysteria about ‘social media’ in the mainstream press is similar in many ways to 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: 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 them the truth. If you’re running a website behind a paywall, you’re competing with TikTok—and losing.

You don't have to produce a TikTok video with words popping up and bouncing around, but if we block kids from reading the truth, we 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 straying too far into politics; (2) you’re revealing classified information; or (3) you’ve been spending too much time on Bluesky. 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 stronger 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 fat-free and mostly tasteless. This might explain the muted reaction to the current beef shortage: the stuff 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, were ridiculed, censored, and dismissed by academics and in the media during Covid. While Chou mainly advocated “nudges”,^[4] pop-ups that selectively nagged Twitter users who expressed heterodox opinions, censorship was what we got. The deluge of misinformation from top science journals and the brutal repression of dissent about the vax left a permanent black mark on the reputation of science. Once censorship, labeling, and repression become accepted means of handling disputes, it never stops with the “other guy.”

We need the science establishment to exclude politics ruthlessly. Separation of politics and science should be a sacred principle. 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. The NIH was funding grants to support DEI and brutally harassing any employee who questioned it. These ventures into politics were killing the freedom of thought that is essential to science. A little self-censorship, or what used to be called discretion, might have gone a long way.

Those Twitter ‘nudges’ undoubtedly weakened the control of Twitter by the anti-‘misinformation’ brigades. It is now X, a platform that mostly respects freedom of speech. Claims that something is ‘misinformation’ need to be backed up with rigorous scientific evidence. Otherwise they are mere politically based assertions that strengthen the argument for absolute freedom of speech.

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. They’re strongly incentivized to blame social media.

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, most likely you would never submit a paper. If you did, reviewers would find an excuse to reject it. They might say your sample size was too small or—my favorite—it adds confusion to the field. It’s also hard to prove a negative. Publication bias isn’t just editors ignoring one side of a question; it's built into the system.

Not everyone can use the strategy Big Pharma used 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 their target value, they stopped. In any other context this would be called p-hacking.

The same is true about possible harm from social media. 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. Even if this were true, banning it would not be a good solution. In fact the only specific example they mentioned was a tweet saying reducing salt could be bad for your health, something that is obviously true if done in excess. That raises questions as to what percentage of tweets truly contained misinformation.

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. That paper is worth reading just for their amusing typo (human skin does not have “Basil cells”). Maybe if we added a few puns in scientific papers, more people would read them.

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. Just as 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 and fix the problem they created.

jul 06 2026, 9:40 am. updated jul 07 2026