Women's Health World finds online misinformation reaching millions

Table of Contents

New independent research analysis has indicated the potential scale, nature, and reach of health misinformation across four major social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok.

The report, which focuses on a sample of posts about fertility, finds that harmful content does not merely coexist alongside accurate health information. It consistently eclipses it, reaching significantly more people with the potential for significant harm.

Women’s Health World (WHW), a London-based organisation that works to reduce the gender health gap and transform women’s health, analysed and categorised a sample of 247 posts across the platforms. The research – part of WHW’s Verified Voices initiative – compared the claims made in the posts with scientifically verified health information and provided a score of 0 to 4, with 0 being fully accurate and 4 being dangerous or predatory.

The analysis of this small initial sample alone shows a harmful content rate of 44 per cent on TikTok, compared with 24.2 per cent on Instagram, 25 per cent on X, and 21.6 per cent on Facebook. The single highest-reach post in the dataset — an Instagram reel presenting fertility pseudoscience as nutritional fact — accumulated 8.91 million views. Its creator holds no verified clinical qualification.

The findings extend beyond platform statistics. On TikTok, 72.7 per cent of posts geotagged for African audiences were rated Level 4. On Facebook, the equivalent rate was 89 per cent. Common tactics include guaranteeing getting pregnant with a certain timeframe based on spurious claims, WhatsApp sales funnels directing users off-platform, and most dangerously explicit instructions to avoid evidence-based medical care.

“Predatory content targeting African women operates at a rate that suggests deliberate exploitation,” the report states. “It takes commercial advantage of precisely those audiences least able to verify claims.”

The engagement paradox

The research identifies a structural problem in how social media algorithms treat health content. On Facebook, Level 4 the predatory posts analysed generated an average of 208 reshares, against 73 for evidence-based Level 0 posts. On Instagram, the nine Level 3 posts — content demonstrably false — accumulated a combined 12.27 million views. On TikTok, misleading content reached 2.6 times the audience of content that was simply anecdotal.

The report concludes that content moderation strategies targeting individual posts cannot address this pattern without reform of the underlying algorithmic architecture.

Niki Kandirikirira, Chief Programmes Officer at Equality Now, which pursues legal and systemic change that addresses violence and discrimination against women and girls around the world, commented:

“Platforms have had years to act on gendered dis and misinformation and have consistently treated it as a content moderation problem rather than a lack of safety in design . This research makes clear that the harm is not incidental to how these systems work. It is a consequence of how they are designed to manipulate behaviours for profit and ideological capture. The burden of responsibility sits with the platforms and governments that should hold them to account.”

Credential washing and platform archetypes

Based on the sample posts, each platform hosts a structurally distinct misinformation type. Facebook is dominated by predatory supplement promotion.

Instagram’s primary harm vector is credentialled pseudoscience: harmful creators consistently use professional-sounding titles — Fertility Doula, Plant Medicine Woman BSc, Fertility Yoga Therapist — to establish trust in claims that lack clinical support. X hosts anti-vaccine fertility conspiracy content embedded within ideological networks resistant to clinical debunking.

TikTok carries geographically targeted predatory content reaching audiences via creator followings of 92,000 on average per Level 4 post.

Dominic Shales, one of the report’s authors at Women’s Health World, said:

“These initial findings are noteworthy, especially given the small sample size. When reviewing 247 posts gathered from a single search term across four platforms, there appears to be potential for harmful content to reach a significant number of women. This indicates the need for additional research to better understand the scope and scale of the challenge of health misinformation targeting women on social platforms, across all areas of health.”

About Women’s Health World

Women’s Health World is an independent global initiative dedicated to improving the quality and length of life for women everywhere. Its founding mission is to halve the 75 million years of healthy life lost by women annually to poor health or early death — a burden driven in part by the gender health gap, and in part by the widespread displacement of accurate health information by harmful alternatives.

WHW will be launching a new media platform to publish evidence-based health content across more than 50 languages, spanning articles, podcasts, long-form video, and interactive tools. It will also launch a Women’s Health Impact Fund to deploy targeted resources towards communities where health misinformation causes the most measurable harm. Twenty per cent of partner investment will flow directly into the Fund, with a Health Impact Credits scheme creating a verifiable link between commercial partnership and real-world impact.