Perceived Social-Media Health Misinformation Predicts Lower Trust and Weaker Patient-Clinician Communication, Not Broad Digital-Health Withdrawal, in HINTS 2022 and 2024

Concerns about false or misleading health information on social media may matter less for broad digital-health withdrawal than for trust and communication. Using pooled HINTS 6 (2022) and HINTS 7 (2024) public-use data, we examined whether two perceptions of social-media misinformation were associated with trust in the health-care system, patient-centered communication, telehealth use, patient-portal use, online health-information seeking, and clinician discussion of social-media health information among U.S. adults. The analytic sample included 10,818 respondents with substantive values on both focal measures. Adjusted pooled models used the official merged 100-replicate HINTS weight construction with jackknife replicate-weight variance estimation. Respondents perceiving less misleading social-media health information were more likely to discuss such information with clinicians, reported better patient-centered communication, and in some contrasts reported higher trust. Perceived misinformation was not associated with telehealth and was weakly related to portal use. Online health-information seeking did not show a simple withdrawal pattern. Overall, perceived social-media health misinformation was linked less to uniform digital-health withdrawal than to trust, patient-centered communication, and clinician discussion.