Hernia mesh and social media: misinformation, legal solicitation, and conflict of interest

Patients often utilize social media platforms as a resource for medical information. Lately, hernia mesh has been surrounded by controversy due to highly publicized mesh recalls. We aimed to assess the rates of misinformation, legal solicitation, and conflict of interest of hernia mesh information on Facebook and YouTube.

We conducted a cross-sectional study of Facebook posts and YouTube videos using the search term “hernia mesh.” The first 150 public Facebook posts and YouTube videos were initially selected, in addition to the first 30 posts of public Facebook groups. Video/post characteristics and the presence of misinformation, legal solicitation, and conflict of interest were independently recorded by three trained raters. Fleiss’ kappa coefficient (ĸ) was calculated to determine Inter-rater agreement.

A total of 129 Facebook posts and 108 YouTube videos were analyzed. 29% of posts/videos were uploaded by a law firm and 24% were uploaded by medical professionals. The raters indicated that an average of 11% posts/videos contained misinformation, 17% involved legal solicitation, and 21% included conflicts of interest. Inter-rater agreement was fair for misinformation (ĸ = 0.380–0.382), substantial/almost perfect for legal solicitation (ĸ = 0.780–0.876), and moderate for conflict of interest (ĸ = 0.448–0.505).

With regard to hernia mesh, misinformation, legal solicitation, and conflict of interest are somewhat common on popular social media platforms. Trained raters had a high level of agreement on legal solicitation but limited agreement on misinformation. Our findings suggest that recognizing misinformation on social media regarding hernia mesh is difficult.