[Digital health communication and factors of influence]

The scope of this article is the complex transformation of health communication in the face of the Internet and social media. Formerly, experts distributed longer pieces of information to target audiences. Today, "many-to-many" communication increasingly dominates, for example via social media. Information is getting shorter, more emotional, and personalized, with more pictures and videos. This contribution focuses on active online-searching behavior for health information and its reception and evaluation by users as well as the underlying factors of credible health communication and the necessity of quality control of health communication on the Internet. Although the article is not based on a systematic literature study, it provides an expert review of the state of the art of the literature in the field.