New research from the University of Utah suggests that while websites containing questionable health information are not widespread, older Americans are more likely to visit them. The study, published in Nature Aging, tracked the web browsing habits of over 1,000 U.S. adults for four weeks.
Lead author Ben Lyons, an associate professor in the Department of Communication, said: "It's sort of good news, though. Overall, the levels are pretty low," emphasizing that only a small number of people—both young and old—are drawn to dubious medical information online. "Not all older adults are like this, but the outliers are concentrated among older adults."
The researchers found that just 13% of participants visited at least one site with low-credibility health information during the study period. These visits accounted for only 3% of all health-related browsing. However, most visits were concentrated among a small group; the top 10% of participants made up more than three-quarters of all visits to such sites.
Lyons and his colleagues, Andy King and Kimberly Kaphingst, worked with the university's School of Medicine and Huntsman Cancer Institute to compare engagement with health misinformation to political misinformation. Lyons noted: "The age effect is way bigger for politics," explaining that people find political content more entertaining and are therefore more motivated to share it than health content. "You don't get a feeling of team identity from sharing health misinformation like you would for information that puts down your political opponents."
The study used both survey responses and data on actual web browsing and YouTube viewing. Out of about 9 million URLs visited—including 500,000 YouTube videos—only 78 domains (6.8% of those categorized as health-related) were classified as containing low-credibility health information.
Older adults generally spend more time seeking health information online due to higher medical needs. This may explain their increased exposure to dubious sites. The researchers found higher ratios of visits involving low-credibility information among older adults.
"Most people are not visiting these kinds of websites," Lyons said. "Visits are pretty rare overall, but the sort of patterns we've seen in numerous trace-data studies tend to be replicated here. It's older adults, in particular, those who consume more right-leaning partisan news. We wouldn't necessarily hypothesize that from the get-go."
Lyons’s team also looked at how users arrived at these sites but did not find evidence that referrals came from Google searches or social media platforms like Facebook or from partisan news media directly—even though there was a correlation with right-leaning news consumption. Instead, they found that visitors often navigated directly between similar low-credibility sites.
"Are people going through Google search, or are they being referred through Facebook? We're not really seeing that in this data," Lyons said. "We're also not seeing people being referred through partisan news media, even though that is a correlate. What we found, at least in the referral data, is that it's a more insular type of thing. They're visiting these because they visit other low-credibility sites, they're clicking through, and they're spending more time on these sites. They're going to them directly."
Another finding showed individuals who already believed false health claims or held conspiratorial views were more likely to encounter dubious content online.
The study concludes that efforts to improve online health information environments should focus especially on seniors but notes broader internet usage patterns complicate potential solutions.
