At GlobalFact11, we discussed the main challenges that fact-checkers face when working on health topics.
What stood out to me is the repeated refrain that the biggest obstacle was lack of health experts that would be on “standby” to help investigate a particular health topic and claim.
What strikes me is that one of the biggest problems is something that is solvable and that can be addressed with cooperation between academia, fact-checkers and health organizations. Public health profession need to be much better at understanding and implementing new partnerships to promote credible, accurate health information, like collaborations with fact-checking organizations.
The big buckets of challenges that we discussed were:
Navigating partnerships
- Connecting with other health fact checkers and need for network
- Maintaining editorial independence
- Managing conflicts of interest (e.g. with pharma)
- Defining and measuring public health success
- How to communicate effectively with health sector
- How can universities support health factchecking
Lack of access to expertise and information
- Access to scientific journals, public health information
- Access to “on call” public health experts
- How to increase success of asking for comment from experts
Funding/ sustainability
- Where are sources of funding
Specific issues in addressing health mis/disinformation
- How to monitor information environment better and in different languages – do we need to monitor everything to detect health misinformation?
- How to address health disinformation (e.g. hijacked narratives for political or protifeering ends)
- Simplify overly complex medical information
- What to do when there is insufficient evidence/consensus
- How to ensure that factcheck remains valid in changing scientific landscape
- Level of information public needs when addressing health claim; health literacy
- What to do about influencers who spread health misinformation
- How can healthcare providers better communicate with public
- How can journalists better understand health topics
- How does one create trusted sources in health
Return to health x fact-checking