Content quality versus sharing practices on social media: A cross-sectional analysis of nutrition information on Twitter

Abstract

Objective: To use the validated Online Quality Assessment Tool (OQAT) to assess; the quality of online nutrition information, the difference between re-tweeted articles, and the impact of original information source. Setting: Twitter (X) as little known about the quality of nutrition information shared on the platform. Design: Tweet Archiver collected tweets including the word nutrition on seven randomly selected days in 2021. Tweets were screened for URL inclusion and grouped based on retweet status. URLs were assessed using the OQAT. Rasch measures defined quality levels (low, satisfactory, and high-quality), while mean differences of retweeted and non-retweeted data were assessed by the Mann-Whitney U test. The Cochran-Mantel-Haenszel test was used to compare information quality by source. Results: In total, 10,573 URLs were collected from 18,230 tweets. After screening for relevance, 1,005 articles were assessed (9,568 were out of scope) sourced from: professional-blogs (n=354), news-outlets (n=213), companies (n=166), personal-blogs (n=120), NGOs (n=60), magazines (n=55), universities (n=19), government (n=18). Rasch measures indicated the quality levels; 0-3.48, poor, 3.49-6.3, satisfactory and, 6.4-10, high quality. Personal and company-authored blogs were more likely to rank as poor quality. There was a significant difference in quality of retweeted (n=267, sum of rank, 461.6) and non-retweeted articles (n=738, sum of rank, 518.0), U = 87475, p=0.006, but no significant effect of information source on quality. Conclusions: Lower-quality nutrition articles were more likely to be retweeted. Caution is required when using or sharing articles, particularly from companies and personal blogs, which tended to be lower-quality sources of nutritional information.