Sudipta Sengupta, Founder-CEO of The Healthy India Project, one of India’s leading health fact-checking platforms that has been flagging health misinformation to Meta and Google for the last five years, tells you that health misinformation is never completely black or white. It is grey and that’s where the main problem lies.
“It is rare that we can label the misinformation that we fact check as true or false. Most of them fall in the category of half-truth, or missing context, or half-false,” Sengupta says.
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Upon investigation of these viral misleading health claims, there are a few patterns that almost never fail to attract people.
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“One is the conspiracy theory, which is simply to get viewership. It is nothing but creating a five-second hook like ‘Pharma Giants don’t want you to know’. The other is over-simplification of content. It simply means when you give out information, it is never simple or complex, it has to be right in between. … The third is, in the age of AI, ‘so and so doctor has said it.’ Now, this is not exclusive to health misinformation. This happens even for social or political misinformation,” Sengupta explains.
