Relationships Between Social Media Use, Exposure to Vaccine Misinformation and Online Health Information Seeking Behaviour

Abstract

This study examines the relationships between social media use for health information, exposure to HPV vaccine misinformation, and online health information-seeking behaviours from institutional sources (i.e., professional health websites and search engines) among college students. The results show that people who seek health information from social media tend to have more experiences of encountering HPV vaccine misinformation during their social media use, while there was no significant relationship between general social media use and exposure to HPV vaccine misinformation. This study also found that people with many experiences of encountering HPV misinformation on social media are more likely to use professional health websites when they look for health information online. However, there was no relationship between exposure to misinformation on social media and the use of search engines for health information seeking.