Online Health Information Seeking in Social Media

Communication platforms including social media have become a resource for various information for diverse people. This includes health information for individuals who seek advice, explore symptoms, and learn about various health conditions. As it significantly impacted how people seek and consume health information, this paper aims to appraise current scholarship on how health information seeking or HIS behavior on social media has been recently investigated and portray the characteristics of social media platforms that facilitate HIS. The search in the Scopus, Science Direct, and PubMed databases returned 252 records, of which 24 studies published from 2013 to 2023 met the eligibility criteria after reviewing the full-text documents. Results of the study indicated that the prominent users of social media for HIS are generally younger, more educated, have lower health conditions, and are female. Influenced by varied motivations, the most used social media platforms are social networking sites (SNS), video-sharing platforms, and social Q&A websites. The different features of these platforms allowed information seekers to engage with other users, receive context-specific information, access varied information sources, and inquire anonymously. However, despite its advantages, HIS in social media raises concerns about unreliable data, the spread of misinformation, and anxiety. This review presented how far the existing literature has gone on HIS in social media, but it also highlighted the dearth of research on information-related factors and anxiety leading to cyberchondria, and inequality in the distribution of studies in some social media platforms and for some social groups.