Why Older Adults Should Beware of Health Advice on Social Media

“The average older adult is not all that different than the average younger person, but for whatever reason, there is a cluster of people that have high engagement with this [misleading information on social media] that tend to be over 60,” says Ben Lyons, an associate professor of communication at the University of Utah, where he studies the intersection of media, politics and the public’s understanding of science.

After all, with more leisure time can come more scrolling, with more health complications can come more interest in remedies, and with less digital acumen can come more blind spots.

One 2022 study, for instance, evaluated older adults’ vulnerability to online misinformation by asking 59 people ages 58 to 83 to choose an article they’d like to read from a group of catchy headlines. The participants then read those articles and viewed their accompanying emotional images, and judged whether the articles were credible and worthy of sharing. On average, only 41 percent of the articles were judged accurately, and 62.5 percent of the articles participants wanted to share were false — even after they were warned some clips could be phony.

The researchers hypothesized that most the participants abided by the “better safe than sorry” principle, or preferred to believe potentially inaccurate information than risk dismissing correct advice.  And when such “advice” is coming from an earnest face with a big following and a captivating story, it’s only that much harder to look away.

“They're called influencers for a reason — these guys really know how to reach their audience in a compelling way, and if we can use it for good, that will be tremendous,” says Dr. Steve Woloshin, a professor of the Dartmouth Institute who studies how to enhance the quality of medical communication to the public, patients, physicians and policymakers. “The problem is that it's sometimes — either intentionally or unintentionally — misused, or people on the receiving end overinterpret or don't critically question the messages. And that's where the problem is.”

Not that all people over 50 are equally exploited. In his recent study, published in Nature Aging, Lyons and colleagues found that in older Americans, the belief in inaccurate health claims or dubious news — such as partisan political content — correlated with exposure to health misinformation (which may or may not equate with being duped).  Whether in politics or health, “those sort of morally indignant headlines or sensational headlines or rage-baiting headlines might be especially attractive to a small group of people,” Lyons says. 

Women seeking support for menopause are also easily gripped by influencers and telemedicine companies propping up tests, hormone therapies and unscientific advice, says Dr. Lauren Streicher, a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, who is collaborating on a new project with AARP Books.

“Menopause is unique because most women do not see a clinician about menopause, and if they do see a physician or someone else, it's the exception rather than the rule that that person really is an expert and is able to help them,” she says. “So therefore, more than almost any other situation in healthcare, women tend to rely on the information they're getting on social media.” 

As a result, a group of experts wrote in the BMJ, women are investing in often unnecessary and unproven hormone panel tests, which is harming care. “The principle of evidence-based practice is that a test should only be done if the result will directly guide patient care,” the doctors wrote. “For perimenopause and menopause, hormone testing offers no reliable way to determine who will benefit from treatment.”

6 Ways to Judge Health Advice on Social Media

For now, consumers can’t rely on regulatory bodies or social media platforms to vet influencers and their messages, let alone their followers in the comments sections. Instead, it’s in individuals’ hands to get savvy about their social media consumption. “Ultimately, we have to make the audiences smarter,” Woloshin says. 

Here’s what he and other experts recommend:

1. Understand that not all “doctors” are created equal

Some health influencers are health professionals, and some research predictably shows that their content tends to be more balanced and less promotional than influencers who aren’t in the medical field. Still, just because someone is a physician doesn’t mean they’re qualified to talk about all things health and medicine. “So many of these people on social media have an MD after their name, and you kind of assume that if someone has an MD after their name, then they must know what they're talking about,” says Streicher, who has tens of thousands of followers across platforms herself. “And in fact, that is just simply not the case.” 

An orthopedist is rarely a menopause expert; an ob-gyn is unlikely to be up-to-date on physical therapy protocols. “Beware of a physicist talking to you about cancer,” Lyons says. 

2. Be wary of product sales

Streicher is frequently pitched by brands who want her to endorse their women’s health products on social media. Bound by personal and professional ethics, she turns them down. Nonmedical professional influencers may not. After all, it’s their job to attract eyeballs and drive sales, no matter how compelling or even true their content is. “There's a huge incentive for these people online to promote a product because they're making money from it,” Streicher says. 

Regardless of the influencers’ motives, any pills, creams, tests and products can have downsides beyond cost. “You can't just focus on benefit — you have to also think about the downsides of things,” Woloshin says. “All medicines, all tests, all treatments have harms.” 

3. Beware of single-symptom endorsements

Health influencers who emphasize only one symptom as a sign of a disease or disorder are missing important intricacies of the diagnostic process. “When health information is presented like, ‘If you have this one symptom, this means that you have this condition,’ that’s a red flag,” Rodwell says. “It’s much deeper than that.… Diagnoses aren’t just one thing; they’re a pattern of symptoms that need to be verified by a doctor.” 

Plus, believing you have a condition you don’t can make some people “spiral into some pretty deep health anxiety,” Rodwell says. What’s more, she adds, “if you’re convinced you have a condition, you may be making decisions that are unsupported by evidence, and that’s harmful and dangerous.” 

4. Notice your own biases

Social media algorithms are engineered to feed you what you want to hear, and to confirm existing beliefs.  Try to keep that top of mind while scrolling. Likewise, social media personalities can tug on your heartstrings in a way that a scientific journal article cannot. Try not to let that cloud your vision too much.

“People see an influencer as talking from their own personal experience and so they're more trustworthy than some journalists and some fancy publication or medical journals, who [they perceive as] trying to sell something,” Woloshin says. “But in fact, influencers are often doing exactly the same thing.” 

5. Refresh your statistics knowledge

Social media posts are, by nature, catchy and chatty. There’s rarely time (or motivation) for influencers to truly spell out what some impressive-sounding statistics actually mean. For example, if someone claims a product improves symptoms by 50 percent, that could really just mean people’s pain went from a score of 2 to 1 on a 10-point scale. “It’s remarkable how much smaller the differences are than what people expect or assume that they are, and that's really important,” Woloshin says.

What’s more, influencers may be citing market research funded by a brand — not clinical research funded by, say, a university, Streicher says.  

6. Keep up on your ‘digital housekeeping’

Take some time to clean up your digital habits. Maybe that’s setting alarms to limit scrolling time or unfollowing “hyper-partisan” accounts, Lyons suggests. “A few of these outlier accounts can really improve people's overall information environments,” he says. 

Being proactive, not passive, about when and how you engage with social media is an important habit, no matter your age. Misleading health advice on the platforms “is not only an issue for older people, and it's not because older people are necessarily less literate or in cognitive decline,” Lyons says. “You have people targeting you — that’s not your fault.”