How accurate are health headlines in your social media feed?

November 2, 2018 — Every day we are bombarded with health news in our social media feeds: from studies touting the benefits—or harms—of a particular food to research on a new treatment for a disease. But how accurate are those headlines? That’s the question a multidisciplinary research team led by Noah Haber, ScD ’19, tried to answer. And their findings showed that health news shared in social media is likely to be overstated and/or inaccurate. In this week’s episode, we speak with Haber about how that happens—and what can be done to improve health reporting.

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MetaCausal: Health science, statistics, and media