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

Objective: To use the validated Online Quality Assessment Tool (OQAT) to assess the quality of online nutrition information.

Setting: The social networking platform was formerly known as Twitter (now X).

Design: Utilising the Twitter search application programming interface (API; v1·1), all tweets that included the word 'nutrition', along with associated metadata, were collected on seven randomly selected days in 2021. Tweets were screened, those without a URL were removed and the remainder were grouped on retweet status. Articles (shared via URL) were assessed using the OQAT, and quality levels were assigned (low, satisfactory, high). Mean differences between 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 URL were collected from 18 230 tweets. After screening for relevance, 1005 articles were assessed (9568 were out of scope) sourced from professional blogs (n 354), news outlets (n 213), companies (n 166), personal blogs (n 120), NGO (n 60), magazines (n 55), universities (n 19) and 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 the quality of retweeted (n 267, sum of rank, 461·6) and non-retweeted articles (n 738, sum of rank, 518·0), U = 87 475, 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 tend to be lower-quality sources of nutritional information.