Five tensions in how public health addresses misinformation and the information environment in health: A Viewpoint (Preprint)

Résumé fourni par la source

UNSTRUCTURED The information environment shapes what health information people encounter, how they interpret it, and whether they act on it. It is, therefore, a structural determinant of health. Yet public health scholarship and practice often reduce it to communication issue, in essence treating it asa vehicle for addressing problems in health information delivery through faster correction of misinformation better messaging and more effective social marketing. Addressing information environment challenges in health is especially slow moving from research into practice, because academic studies are narrow by design while public health practitioners work in settings that are complex, underfunded, and pressed to act in the present on many fronts at once. This Viewpoint sets out five structural tensions that fragment how public health institutions currently address misinformation and the information environment in health. They recur across research, practice, and policy, and each persists because both sides of it are needed. They run between 1) content and structure, 2) information and discourse, 3) emergency and sustained action, 4) universal and context-specific approaches, and 5) territorial governance and the transnational flow of health information. They also clarify what different kinds of evidence can support, and why evidence from narrowly defined interventions is often difficult to translate into responses that must operate across systems, communities, and time. These tensions matter because data do not become health action on their own; they must be translated into evidence, communicated as information, discussed and trusted enough to guide decisions. Taken together, they reveal the points at which this chain is weakened, distorted, or rendered difficult to govern. Current attention and effort concentrate on what claims or narratives can be measured and corrected, while the structural conditions that produce harmful information and discourse are harder to measure and harder to act on. The aim is not to resolve these tensions once and for all, but to use them diagnostically; demonstrating where evidence is strong, where governance is weak, and where trust, meaning, and context shape whether health information can support action. Infodemiology is distinct from other fields studying the information environment because its purpose is health. Its task is to develop approaches and measures suited to these tensions, attentive to how trust is earned and how people act on health information over time and grounded in the mandate of health systems to work not only against disease but toward wellbeing.

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