Towards Conviviality in NavigatingHealth Information on Social Media

Abstract

HCI is increasingly concerned with health information quality and spread of misinformation on social media. Despite many major platforms having been adopted across the world, the situated evaluation and sharing of health information is underexplored across diverse health systems and cultural and political contexts. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, we study the navigation of health information on social media in urban and rural South India, backdropped by plural knowledges around health and the specific politics and sociality of health and social media in this setting. We use Ivan Illich's concept of tools for conviviality [49] to distinguish between how people creatively use tools versus how tools manage and impose values on people - participants aimed to use health information towards care beyond institutionalized healthcare, but insidious misinformation and information-sharing practices served to commodify, spark uncertainty in, and discipline caring behavior. We use our findings to expand understandings of the use of health information on social media and how positionality shapes how people are affected by and respond to misinformation. We also draw attention to the structural aspects of health misinformation in the Indian context and how the design of social media platforms might play a role in addressing it.