Die Online-Exposition gegenüber medizinischen Fehlinformationen konzentriert sich auf ältere Erwachsene. Der Verkehr auf solchen Websites konzentriert sich stark auf ältere Erwachsene, insbesondere auf diejenigen, die politisch rechts stehen.

**Online exposure to medical misinformation concentrated among older adults**

Even as misinformation proliferates across the Internet, sites containing low-credibility health information remain relatively scarce and unseen.

That’s according to new research from University of Utah communication scholars who tracked web-surfing activities of more than 1,000 U.S. adults for four weeks. But the findings, published in Nature Aging, illuminate a dark side. **Traffic to such sites is concentrated heavily among older adults, especially among those who lean right politically.**

This indicates the most vulnerable population is the most likely to be exposed to potentially harmful health-related information online, according to lead author Ben Lyons, an associate professor in the Department of Communication.

“It’s sort of good news, though. Overall, the levels are pretty low,” Lyons said, emphasizing that it’s still a small number of people, young and old, who are drawn to dubious medical information while surfing the web. “Not all older adults are like this, but the outliers are concentrated among older adults.”

To conduct the study, the team analyzed both survey results and actual web-browsing and YouTube-viewing data. The survey data were gathered via questionnaires midway through the four-week study period.

During this period, the participants landed on about 9 million URLs, including 500,000 YouTube videos, according to the trace data. Lyons and King coded the websites for health content, separating those by commercial and informational content. Of the 1,055 domains categorized with the health tag, just 78 or 6.8% trafficked in low-credibility health information.

Only 13% of participants visited even one such site during the four-week period, and those visits made up just 3% of all health-related browsing.

But the exposure was highly concentrated in a small group of people. The top 10% of participants accounted for more than three-quarters of all visits to low-credibility health sites.

Since older adults have more health burdens and make more medical decisions, they tend to spend more time seeking out health information online. It would naturally follow that they may be more likely to be exposed to medical misinformation, so the researchers examined the ratios of visits involving low-credibility information. They found these ratios to be much higher for older adults.

For those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-025-01059-x

The problem is concentration. A small group accounts for most of the exposure and that group tends to be older, especially people who already consume more right-leaning news. It is also not really coming from Google or social media people are mostly clicking around within the same shady sites

So it is less “the internet is flooded with fake health info” and more a vulnerable minority keeps running into the same bad sources