Characterization of False or Misleading Fluoride Content on Instagram: Infodemiology Study

Abstract

Background: Online false or misleading oral health-related content has been propagated on social media to deceive people against fluoride's economic and health benefits to prevent dental caries. Objective: The aim of this study was to characterize the false or misleading fluoride-related content on Instagram. Methods: A total of 3863 posts ranked by users' total interaction and published between August 2016 and August 2021 were retrieved by CrowdTangle, of which 641 were screened to obtain 500 final posts. Subsequently, two independent investigators analyzed posts qualitatively to define their authors' interests, profile characteristics, content type, and sentiment. Latent Dirichlet allocation analysis topic modeling was then applied to find salient terms and topics related to false or misleading content, and their similarity was calculated through an intertopic distance map. Data were evaluated by descriptive analysis, the Mann-Whitney U test, the Cramer V test, and multiple logistic regression models. Results: Most of the posts were categorized as misinformation and political misinformation. The overperforming score was positively associated with older messages (odds ratio [OR]=3.293, P