Have you ever been at a concert moments before it starts and noticed how the few hundred people in attendance all have their individual conversations going with people near them? Everyone is in their own little world, hearing, understanding, agreeing/disagree, offering opinions or instructions to their conversation partner, not at all engaged with whatever other conversation is going on around them. A hundred little bits of discourse between a couple or small groups floating around the arena clashing into, but not disturbing each other. Then suddenly, Tina/Cher/Barbara/Beyonce/Drake sings out and that one voice slashes through all the others and immediately commands the willing audience to go where it wants them to go.

This, to me, exemplifies great public discourse. You have different individuals consumed by their own circumstance willing to be in the presence of others they do not know but who share the desire for a satisfactory outcome. Then you have the charismatic leader who very literally has the mic and voice to deliver the satisfaction the audience seeks because they have studied the tastes of the audience and prepared for weeks in advance to deliver something new and challenging complemented by the familiar.

When it comes to public discourse related to inaccurate and biased (“bad”) consumer health information on the Internet, the challenge is not just to determine how to be the leader expertly wielding the mic, but also to determine which mic to use to best reach the audience. There are many choices, but they all have their downside. For example, Twitter’s brevity does not allow for a good enough explanation for why or how information is bad or good (i.e., accurate and unbiased). Facebook and the like have communities that can isolate themselves preventing the intrusion of good (or even bad) information. Search engines do not have a consistent method to help people differentiate what is good from what is bad because often their models focus on providing the highest ranked search to those who can pay to play.

So I ask you, what would be the best technology-based medium to reach a variety of people with good consumer health information and instruction on how to find the same for other health topics in the future?

“My husband makes me use separate dishes because he is afraid of getting it. I saw something on the Internet about colloidal silver will this help me?”

Around 2013-ish, a woman called me because she had recently been diagnosed with HIV and was distraught. She made the above statement and I felt her desperation and pain through the phone. I also felt anger, because once again I had to crush the hope of another recently diagnosed, terrified person by telling them that all things on the Internet are not true.

I was working at a small nonprofit organization in Houston, Texas that focused on providing the most up-to-date health and treatment information to people living with HIV. Many of the people that came through the doors of the agency were scared and desperate for a cure for the disease. Some of them were so desperate that they were willing to try anything.

A lot of them went to the Internet to find information that could disprove their clinician’s assertion that a cure does not exist. Many of them found what they thought they were looking for on websites feature the elusive “cure” and that often asked them to provide payment to get the secret.

As a trained public health worker, I have come across this situation often. Desperate people will do almost anything to get out of their desperate situation. It makes me angry that there are people who would profit (either monetarily or through some perverse personal satisfaction) from putting information on the Internet that could potentially harm the end-user. Yes, it may be true that some of the posters may actually think they are helping someone, but the damage done from these types of posters is no less potentially harmful to those already experiencing compromised health.

I plan to address this problem in all of its complexity. There must be a way that the public health/social work community can work with the Internet content developer community to provide not just a tool to help locate accurate information, but a community movement that will address this issue.