KFF’s New Health Misinformation and Trust Initiative 

From Drew Altman, Ph.D., KFF President and CEO, KFF Health News Founding Publisher

As part of our new Initiative on Health Misinformation and Trust, I wanted to share with you a new report we launched today as a service for anyone and everyone interested in health misinformation and trust. It’s called the KFF Health Misinformation Monitor, and it tracks the spread of health misinformation in the U.S. with a goal of helping you stay up to date and strengthening efforts to counter misinformation.

KFF polling we conducted developing this Initiative showed why this matters: We found that most Americans have encountered health misinformation, but that a large group simply isn’t sure if it’s true or false. Most people fall into this muddled middle place—underscoring the real opportunities we have to counter misinformation but also the risks of inaction.

The Monitor is one piece of our larger initiative we are launching today. We will monitor the latest developments in health misinformation, poll regularly and deeply about how misinformation is affecting the American people—as well as about trust in facts and science and the messengers who convey it—and mobilize the news media interested in health misinformation. KFF Health News will add its power to the health misinformation beat. We will spotlight the role of AI, both as a tool to help ferret out misinformation and as a perpetrator of it. And as is always the case at KFF, we will focus especially on how misinformation is affecting low-income communities and communities of color. A significant grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, where I worked many years ago, has helped us plan and begin this work and I am grateful for that.

What you’ll find in the Monitor, which is free and will be published twice a month, is a summary of recent developments involving health misinformation and trust culled from hundreds of sources, including traditional news media organizations, social media platforms, peer-reviewed journals, and public opinion surveys. The first edition summarizes a new KFF Health Misinformation Tracking Poll focusing on TikTok, a social-media platform used by more than four in 10 adults.

Each edition will cover a range of topics reflecting emerging health misinformation, online narratives, misinformation policy, the latest research, and public opinion data from KFF produced for the Initiative. You can sign up to receive it by email.

Irving Washington, Senior Vice President and Executive Director of the Initiative, and Hagere Yilma, senior manager, are leading the effort. Irving was formerly CEO of the Online News Association and joined us to help develop and lead this new Initiative. But almost everyone at KFF will have a hand in this in some way; that’s how we work—we bring all our assets to bear from across KFF on top organizational priorities.