Every day, health advice circulates across social media, messaging apps, and websites — on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, and countless blogs and forums. Some of this content is accurate and useful. Much of it is not. The challenge is that misleading health information is often designed to look convincing, and the skills needed to identify it are rarely taught explicitly.
This module is grounded in the five national surveys conducted across the partner countries between June and September 2025. The findings reveal a consistent and urgent picture: the ability to identify health disinformation is critically low across all five countries. The problem is not motivation or distrust in authorities — it is a missing practical toolkit.
Highlights from the comparative report
> Italy: 64% of respondents cite misleading online content as their primary barrier to reliable health information; 42% are uncertain whether they have ever shared false health information;
> Lithuania: 48% say lack of skills to assess reliability is their main barrier; only approximately 1 in 3 consistently fact-checks despite awareness of misinformation;
> Croatia: only 5.6% of respondents could correctly classify false health information. 80.4% had encountered fake medicines or miracle cures online.
> Bulgaria: 83% had encountered miracle product disinformation; uncertainty and contradictory information — not language complexity — are the main obstacles.
> Cyprus: 53.7% cite the overwhelming presence of misleading online content as the main obstacle to informed health decisions.
This module directly addresses this gap. It equips learners with a concrete, replicable set of tools they can apply immediately to any health claim encountered online. The three categories covered are the verification of images and videos, the analysis of websites and domains, and the assessment of social media accounts.
See more in Module 2.
