In January 2025, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, announced the termination of a fact-checking initiative aimed at curbing medical misinformation and other dubious content on its platforms. Some critics viewed this as an attempt by Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to placate former President Donald Trump, who had threatened to jail Zuckerberg in 2024.
Similarly, the social media platform once called Twitter discontinued its own fact-checking efforts after Elon Musk acquired and rebranded it as X in 2022.
According to experts interviewed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the proliferation of misinformation on social media is expected to grow, even as these platforms remain a primary news source for most young Americans. They advise applying the timeless adage: if it seems too good to be true, it likely is.
David Greene, senior staff attorney and civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, expressed concern about the declining quality of information on these sites. "However," he added, "it's worth asking whether they were ever reliable sources for health information in the first place."
Greene noted that even before Meta and X shifted from human editors to "community notes" or crowdsourced editing, the platforms were rife with inaccurate and potentially harmful medical and health content.
Laurel Bristow, an infectious disease researcher at Emory's Rollins School of Public Health, explained that much of the health-related content on social media is crafted to promote products. She recommends seeking out profiles managed by experts who aren't pushing supplements or other goods. Bristow herself gained a following of over 400,000 as a science influencer on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic and now hosts a weekly podcast, "Health Wanted," which recently explored the issue of misinformation.
"One of the best actions you can take is to avoid sharing misinformation on social platforms," Bristow advised. "If something seems too good or too bad to be true, pause to verify it. A strong emotional reaction is often a sign that it might not be factual."
A Pew Research Center study found that 86% of U.S. adults "at least sometimes" get news from digital devices like smartphones, computers, or tablets, with 57% doing so frequently.
Among Gen Z—those born between 1996 and 2010—78% get news from social media at least occasionally, and 37% regularly turn to influencers for news, according to Pew. While the study didn’t specify which platforms Gen Z favors, it included TikTok, a Chinese social media site that transitioned to AI-driven content moderation in 2024, as reported by Vice News.
Defined by McKinsey & Company, Gen Z is the second-youngest generation, sandwiched between millennials and Generation Alpha.
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