Health Misinformation on Social Media: A Systematic Literature Review and Future Research Directions

ABSTRACT

Health misinformation on social media is an emerging public concern as the COVID-19 infodemic tragically evidences. Key challenges that empower health misinformation’s spread include rapidly advancing social technologies and high social media usage penetration. However, research on health misinformation on social media lacks cohesion and has received limited attention from information systems (IS) researchers. Given this issue’s importance and relevance to the IS discipline, we summarize the current state of research on this emerging topic and identify research gaps together with meaningful research questions. Following a two-step literature search, we identify and analyze 101 papers. Drawing on the Shannon-Weaver communication model, we propose an integrative stage-based framework of health misinformation on social media. Based on literature analysis, we identify research opportunities and prescribe directions for future research on health misinformation on social media.