Identifying and Responding to Health Misinformation on Reddit Dermatology Forums With Artificially Intelligent Bots...

Area of Science:

• Artificial Intelligence
• Natural Language Processing
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Reddit hosts popular dermatology forums where users seek medical advice.
• Unvalidated information shared on these forums can lead to inappropriate care.
• Artificial intelligence (AI) shows potential in detecting and addressing health misinformation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess AI bots' capability to identify and respond to misinformation concerning tanning and essential oils on Reddit's dermatology forums.
• To evaluate bot performance in a controlled test setting for accuracy and response generation.

Main Methods:

• Utilized natural language processing (NLP) techniques to train AI bots.
• Bots were programmed to identify misinformation using keywords and deliver pre-written corrective responses.
• Compared performance across various AI model architectures on a dedicated test dataset.

Main Results:

• AI models achieved high test accuracies, ranging from 95% to 100%.
• A Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model demonstrated the highest accuracy.
• Bots successfully posted corrective responses to identified misinformation in a simulated environment.

Conclusions:

• AI bots demonstrated high accuracy in detecting health misinformation on Reddit dermatology forums.
• The deployment of bots to post corrective information presents a potential strategy for intercepting misinformation.
• Further research is needed to determine the effectiveness and user persuasiveness of bot-led interventions.