Getting your election news from social media? There’s a chance it could be false. Health myths — such as abortions occurring in the last stages of pregnancy, the government controlling the weather, and vaccines causing developmental disability — have spread during the current election cycle and gripped much of the nation. While it’s not new for mis- and disinformation to circulate, the 2024 campaigns come amid increased sophistication of artificial intelligence (and access to it) and many Americans using social media for hours daily.
The result: Falsehoods become enmeshed in the same places we seek out credible information, leading to an onslaught of confusion about what’s true. Whether these swarming myths will impact the outcome of the presidential election is yet to be seen — and experts say the role of health misinformation is nearly impossible to predict until results are tallied. “There is a lot of disinformation in this election, and more in this (presidential) campaign than we’ve seen historically,” said Emily Vraga, professor in the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota, specializing in health and political misinformation.
The News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit that tracks election misinformation, has identified 747 pieces of mis- or disinformation online (the former being unintentional, the latter intentional) since July 2023. Nearly half of those involved misleading information taken out of .