As social media moderation winds down, Gen Z could step in

“I think it’s right to be concerned that we will have poorer information on these sites,” said David Greene, senior staff attorney and civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Though I think it’s also worth questioning whether these were ever good sources of health information to begin with.”

Greene says even before Meta and X removed human editors and moved to “community notes,” or crowdsourced editing, the sites were plagued with incorrect and possibly dangerous medical and health content.

Much of the health content on social media is designed to sell products, said Laurel Bristow, an infectious disease researcher at Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health. She said to look for profiles that are run by experts who aren’t hawking supplements or other items. Bristow herself became a social media science influencer with more than 400,000 followers during the COVID-19 pandemic and now hosts a weekly podcast, “Health Wanted,” which recently covered the topic of misinformation.

“One of the greatest things you can do is not pass misinformation along on social channels,” Bristow said. “If something seems too good or too bad to be true, take a minute to investigate it. If it evinces a strong reaction from you, that’s also evidence that it probably isn’t factual.”

Science works slowly, Bristow said, and revolutions in medicine happen infrequently. “Posts saying ‘science says this can cure you of all of your ailments’ — that’s usually not true,” she said.

A large majority of U.S. adults (86%) say they “at least sometimes” get news from a smartphone, computer or tablet, including 57% who say they do so often, according to the Pew Research Center.

Among Gen Z, 78% get their news from social media at least some of the time, and 37% say they regularly get news from influencers on social media, Pew found. The data did not break out which sites Gen Z use most, but included Chinese social media site TikTok, which shifted to AI content moderation in 2024, Vice News reported.

Gen Z, or Generation Z, refers to people born between 1996 and 2010. They’re the second-youngest generation, between millennials and Generation Alpha, according to McKinsey & Company.

Bristow says she hopes Gen Z content creations will dive into the thorny work of debunking online myths.

“Gen Z needs to debunk other Gen Zs peddling falsehoods,” she said. “We are going to have people in every generation who take the easy route, to get clicks and engagement. But the phrase that a lie spreads halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on — that existed before social media.”

It’s a game plan that Valerie E. Cadet, professor of microbiology and immunology at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine Georgia in Suwanee, agrees with. “I might be an infectious disease expert, but my kids don’t listen to me,” she said. “They listen to their peers — so we need to find a way for them to feel incentivized to share trusted content.”

The primary strategy Cadet takes with her own kids is to say “that’s fine, you will see it. But you can’t trust it.”

“So you have to go out and look for information that is factual,” she added. “That means look at the AJC, look at 11Alive for news.”