The Washington Post reports today that misinformation about birth control has surged on social media:
Physicians say they’re seeing an explosion of birth-control misinformation online targeting a vulnerable demographic: people in their teens and early 20s who are more likely to believe what they see on their phones because of algorithms that feed them a stream of videos reinforcing messages often divorced from scientific evidence.
....Physicians and researchers say little data is available about the scale of this new phenomenon, but anecdotally, more patients are coming in with misconceptions about birth control fueled by influencers and conservative commentators.
When they say little data is available, they aren't kidding. To my surprise, contraceptive use is barely tracked at all, and the tracking that is done is years out of date. After a good deal of searching, the only relevant information I could find was a limited survey that measured contraceptive use between 2021 and 2023:¹
[Aside from condom use] the research did not reveal significant changes in the proportion of each state's reproductive-aged population using any other methods. We found no significant changes in reports of use of intrauterine devices (IUDs).... And, as with contraceptive use overall, we did not find evidence that the proportion of women who were using their preferred contraceptive method changed between the two time points in any of the four states.
In other words, there was no measurable change in the use of either oral contraceptives or IUDs.
I'm not a sworn foe of anecdotal information. I promise. At the same time, I am a sworn foe of popular delusions and the madness of crowds, regardless of where they come from. Right now we seem to be in the grip of madness about social media, as if misinformation and teenage fads are brand new things that didn't exist before Instagram.
My advice is to keep an open mind about social media, especially if you're old and don't think highly of it in the first place. This goes two ways. It means you should be skeptical of unsupported panics about social media's effects on teens and you should remain open to the possibility that evidence might someday demonstrate concrete harm to teens from social media. Try not to go crazy in either direction.
¹This is a Guttmacher study of women age 18-44 based on an annual survey of contraceptive use from NORC in four states. The raw NORC data goes back to 2017 and covers nine states, but it appears to be available only to scholars, not the general public.
IDK...it sure seems like Ivermectin as prophylactic and treatment was primarily spread through social media, whereas MSM repeatedly sounded the alarm that this was junk science nonsense.
Has anyone actually described the presumed mechanism by which an antiparasitic would function as an antivirus? I feel like this should have been the first question anyone would ask of a doctor who staked their claim on Ivermectin's use to treat COVID and prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection.
It was something to with how part of how it works against parasites is by boosting the immune system and there was some trivial level of effect of this against covid which was irrelevant compared to how much harm it did otherwise.
Which seemed to make it the perfect metaphor of every conservative policy idea, some trivial level of reality or effect justifying massive, irresponsible harm.
It locked right into the wingnut subconscious.
There's always been a lot of mis-information among teens regarding birth control and sex in general.
I'll just say that I've recently seen a lot of birth control misinformation spread by the owner of a certain large social media site (initials are EM). So, the misinfo is obviously out there.
And EM has fathered (at least) 10 children. Could be that EM doesn't know much about contraception, so we should all definitely get important information from him! Are people really that stupid?
Conservatives are highly motivated to spray their crap from all venues because they think they should be the authority on all things, and, for them, it's really easy because they don't have to be right about anything they just to be a huge dick and never shut up.
Do it right and you entertain the masses and earn millions. If liberals do it right a missed comma is a scandal, they earn little and they live in a garret.
Getting it wrong is easy and well compensated because it's a convenience to the wealthy and numbskulls who think about it think they're in on it and cleverly complicit in vicarious crime.
"Aside from condom use"... so did condom use decline among those exposed to the bullshit?
IOW - are young males falling victim to it, while females are the same as they ever were? That would track with the "young men are getting worse these days" anecdata.
It doesn't take social media. There was an astonishing amount of misinformation about birth control and related topics floating around when I was a youth, and I'm a couple of years older than Kevin. For instance, did you know that a virgin can't get pregnant from her first event of sexual intercourse?
Oh, of course young folks believed a lot of dumb stuff back in the day! But it's 70 years since the 1950s, schools have been teaching biology in the schools and sex ed in many of them, so you would normally expect the population is gradually getting smarter.
"more patients are coming in with misconceptions about birth control"
I see what you did there.
"I am a sworn foe of popular delusions and the madness of crowds, regardless of where they come from. "
Then you're going to spend a lot of time fighting social media, I think, Kevin.
I have a comment that sums up what I think is going on that will work for math nerds, but nobody else:
Poisson got his start studying the rash of deaths by being kicked by horses (perhaps mules) in the French Army. After developing a whole new branch of probability and statistics, he concluded that the outbreak was just random chance.
I think it's quite likely that there are some credulous young people out there who are getting misinformed about birth control via social media. I also think it's likely that there are influencers spreading misinformation.
Thing is, there always has been, and always will be, and it's just that this month happened to be the month that several young people all showed up at the same time at the doctors office.
(And yeah, I am on board with reducing the influence of such misinformation. I just want to set expectations.)
Kudos for the Poisson reference! Also, hoping the incidence of French soldiers getting kicked to death by mules has dropped to zero.
Wealthy conservatives are paying influencers to spread birth control misinformation on social media so that, when they move to ban birth control, there will be influencers influencing their supporters to support the ban.
What you experience on any given platform depends heavily on how you use it, who you follow, and who you talk to. It can be used well or poorly, just like the Internet as a whole, making smart people smarter and dumb people dumber. Parents and schools need to talk to kids about social media and warn them about the pitfalls (misinformation, toxic behavior, scams) but not try to stop them from using it entirely. If kids are going to be doing something, it's better to teach them how to do it well.