From Digital Health Literacy to Informational Resilience: A Conceptual Ecosystem Model of Health Information Interpretation in Algorithmically Mediated Environments

The increasing complexity of algorithmically mediated and AI-mediated digital environments is reshaping how health information is interpreted. Existing digital health literacy frameworks predominantly conceptualize vulnerability as a deficit in individual skills, thereby insufficiently capturing the structural and cognitive conditions that shape interpretation. This study develops an integrative conceptual model that reconfigures health information interpretation as an emergent outcome of interacting cognitive, social, and algorithmic mechanisms. The analysis identifies three broad categories of interpretative mechanisms—cognitive, social, and algorithmically mediated—which are subsequently integrated into the five-dimensional Informational Resilience Ecosystem Model (IREM). First, cognitive heuristics and biases shape information processing. Second, social credibility signals influence evaluative judgments and trust formation. Third, algorithmic systems structure the visibility, prioritization, and distribution of information. Interpretation is conceptualized as an emergent outcome of interactions among these mechanisms. Building on these findings, informational resilience is theorized as an emergent system-level property contingent upon the configuration of interacting conditions rather than reducible to individual capacities. The Informational Resilience Ecosystem Model (IREM) captures this structure through five interdependent dimensions: cognitive, informational, social, algorithmic, and credibility infrastructure. The study shifts the analytical focus from competencies to conditions of interpretation and provides a structured framework for empirical operationalization by specifying dimensions, mechanisms, and their interactions. The model provides a theoretically grounded and operationally structured framework for advancing empirical research, public health communication, and platform-level interventions.