Misinformation and Profitability of Hepatitis B Virus Claims on Instagram: Formative Cross-Sectional Study
Background: The internet is increasingly used to find health information, which often contains misinformation. Instagram is a likely source of health information online for many adults worldwide, given that there are more than 2 billion worldwide users. To date, no studies have documented the characteristics of hepatitis B virus (HBV) claims, information accuracy, engagement with, and profitability of HBV information on Instagram. Objective: We aimed to document the characteristics, accuracy, engagement, and profitability of HBV misinformation on Instagram. Methods: In this cross-sectional formative study, 2 research members searched for publicly available Instagram posts using the terms “hepatitis b” and “hep b” and manually extracted data from the most popular posts and user profiles for each term from December 2021 to January 2022 at varying times of the day and days of the week. We applied an existing and validated health misinformation codebook, adapted for this topic, to 103 posts for 58 variables, including post characteristics, types of HBV claims (eg, treatment, prevention, and cure), accuracy of information (misinformation vs accurate, coded by hepatology clinicians), engagement (number of likes), and profitability (yes or no). We calculated descriptive statistics and applied chi-square, Fisher exact, and z tests to compare posts with certain characteristics, claims, and engagement by accuracy and profitability in Stata (version 18.0) with significance set at an α of .05. Results: Of the full sample, most posts had accurate (79/103, 76.7%) versus inaccurate (24/103, 23.3%) information about HBV. Among posts with claims about HBV treatment (18/103, 17.5%), there were more posts that had misinformation than accurate posts (55.6% vs 44.4%; χ²1=12.7; P
