YouTube Breeding Harmful Scientific Misinformation

Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "University of Toronto researchers have uncovered widespread misinformation in videos on YouTube related to vaccination and immunization. In the first-ever study of its kind, they found that over half of the 153 videos analyzed portrayed childhood, HPV, flu and other vaccinations negatively or ambiguously. They also found that videos highly skeptical of vaccinations received more views and better ratings by users than those videos that portray immunizations in a positive light. According to the lead researcher, 'YouTube is increasingly a resource people consult for health information, including vaccination. Our study shows that a significant amount of immunization content on YouTube contradicts the best scientific evidence at large. From a public health perspective, this is very concerning.' An extract from the Journal of the American Medical Association is available online."

Comments

Re:Big deal

[TheDreadSlashdotterD]

I won't bother actually telling you, I'll just raise the question: do you know what "begging the question" actually is?

Re:Big deal

[dubbreak]

What's particularly troubling is how the misinformed get better ratings and more hits than the well informed.

I call this the "DIGG effect". It's what happens when you have an ambiguous rating system such as stars or thumbs up.

People aren't rating based on how informative, interesting, accurate or funny the item is, they are just rating how much they "like" it. So in reality the rating is just a popularity contest. Guess what? Dumb people like dumb things.