[Social media and health: it's time to refine the methodology for interpreting studies and evaluating information.]

The pandemic we are experiencing has accelerated the availability of health content on the Internet, multiplying the points at which such content is generated and shared. As a result, we have witnessed the growing of the "infodemic" phenomenon. To combat it, over the years a series of documents and guides have been produced to provide tools allowing users to evaluate health-related content on the Net. With the advent of social media platforms, these tools have been adapted to posts and videos, focusing on reliability and completeness of the contents, conflicts of interest, accessibility, and usability of social media platforms. Access to studies using data from social media platforms can also lend themselves to misinterpretation. A methodology similar to that used to evaluate systematic reviews to be applied to studies of social media platforms could help citizens, patients and doctors to understand if researchers have focused on the right questions, have provided the right answers, have used the most appropriate social media platforms and analytics tools. Taking a cue from the methodology today used to generate reliable content and to interpret the results of systematic reviews could be the right way to address these new research areas with greater scientific rigor.