{"id":8703,"date":"2026-07-28T13:51:46","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T11:51:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leibniz-hbi.de\/?post_type=hbi-news&p=8703"},"modified":"2026-07-30T16:10:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T14:10:15","slug":"medfluencers-credibility-and-squandered-trust","status":"publish","type":"hbi-news","link":"https:\/\/leibniz-hbi.de\/en\/hbi-news\/news\/medfluencers-credibility-and-squandered-trust\/","title":{"rendered":"Medfluencers, Credibility, and Squandered Trust"},"content":{"rendered":"

Medfluencers provide health information on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. In the Apotheken Umschau podcast, Dr. Laura Weisenburger, a physician and editor at pharmacy magazine Apotheken Umschau, discusses the trustworthiness of this health information with Dr. Claudia Lampert<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Click here<\/a> for the podcast episode of “Ne Dosis Wissen” [A Dose of Knowledge], which is only available in German.<\/p>\n

The conversation was prompted by a recent stunt<\/a> by YouTuber Marvin Wildhage. He invented a fictional disease and created a website for it, along with a briefing containing obvious clues pointing to the hoax. His goal was to test how critically medfluencers scrutinize products and campaigns before promoting them. Despite the fact that the illness was entirely fictional, a medfluencer nonetheless picked it up.<\/p>\n

This podcast episode therefore explores the gray area surrounding such disease-awareness campaigns, the trust placed in medfluencers, ways to assess and regulate them, and the promotion of digital health literacy among social media users.<\/p>\n

Claudia Lampert emphasizes that it is important to empower users to recognize reliable, evidence-based information and to critically evaluate health information from social media. This includes questioning whether content is scientifically sound, whether it can be verified by other sources, and how trustworthy the source in question is. One indicator of credibility, for example, is that the content is not dominated by advertisements for specific products:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe more credible the source, the less advertising for specific products.\u201d<\/p>\n

Photo by Bermix Studio<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":8681,"template":"","categories":[145],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8703","hbi-news","type-hbi-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMedfluencers, Credibility, and Squandered Trust - Leibniz Institut f\u00fcr Medienforschung | Leibniz Institute for Media Research<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/leibniz-hbi.de\/en\/hbi-news\/news\/medfluencers-credibility-and-squandered-trust\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Medfluencers, Credibility, and Squandered Trust\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Medfluencers provide health information on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. 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