Misinformation today affects nearly every healthcare product, treatment, and condition. Its epicenter is online through channels such as Reddit, TikTok, and Instagram, where it metastasizes quickly. Trust in medicine and science is declining which makes populations more susceptible. Misinformation is a monumental threat to a highly regulated industry such as healthcare which can struggle to move nimbly.

Having analyzed billions of conversations online related to misinformation, we begin our understanding of how to mitigate malign narratives in healthcare through two critical definitions.

Misinformation and disinformation are different.

Misinformation is people organically starting and spreading untrue information online, while  disinformation is coordinated groups, including competitors, orchestrating malign narrative. This distinction is made through detection methods such as network composition analysis (mapping the spread of information). While impact is often the same, the role of legal and compliance is elevated with disinformation.

Detection alone is insufficient.

Brands too often prioritize the detection of misinformation rather than its remediation. Think of the Internet as an organism, and misinformation as a cancer. Most brands focus on its detection, which is critical. However, very few have effective prevention strategies in place. Ultimately, the nature of the threat (real v. fake, foreign v. domestic, machine v. human) matters less than how a brand responds to the narrative. Detection is simply the first step in identifying the ground truth of messages, images, and influences resonating online in forming a defense.

Counter-Programming Misinformation

In our experience there are three things marketing, advertising and communications teams can do to protect their brands, treatments, and products against misinformation:

1. Distribute more approved content. The best defense is a good offense in preventing the spread of harmful narratives online. Healthcare brands are confronted with the reality that they simply need to distribute more approved content online. While this requires a true partnership with compliance, scale matters in combating misinformation. Fortunately, there are new processes, partners, and tools to curate, commission, and produce this content at scale, quality, and compliance from authentic advocates .

2. Choose authentic messengers. Increasingly, patients are most influenced by imperfect, lo-fi content from peers, confirmed by a study by Meta analyzing ads across all its platforms. Sophisticated health marketers are embracing patient stories who share experiences, conditions, medications, treatments and providers with their respective communities to complement their own creative. For the first time brands can identify, credential, recruit, and activate members of specialized communities to innoculate against misinformation as well as mitigate it.

3. Invest in patient literacy content. In another study, of those who had been given media and information literacy training, 73.3% could accurately identify fake information, while of those who had not undergone the training, only 53.6% could identify fake information. Smart healthcare brands are being asked to walk the line between sharing facts and figures and recognizing the power of personal experiences and emotions in healthcare decisions. This needle can be threaded, but requires the right partners to work with compliance in its execution. 

Fortunately, measurement tools have been improving which allow brands to calibrate and optimize their response. For example, we are again vectoring search and social visibility – how likely a patient or consumer is likely to find correct information based on volume and relevance – as a dynamic KPI to guide our patient education and advocacy campaigns. In short, the tools are better for detection, remediation, optimization, compliance, and measurement.

Misinformation took center stage during COVID, but for those of us in healthcare, we have seen its rise over a decade since the mass adoption of social media. The content-first and patient-centric approach outlined in this article has been utilized successfully in other regulated markets as well as the front-lines of public health and safety. Healthcare brands can now apply this playbook as the cornerstone to prevent and remediate misinformation.