Get Healthy!

• Posted February 23, 2026

Seniors More Likely To Browse Bad Medical Info On The Web

Seniors are more likely to surf web sites containing quack medical information, potentially putting their health at risk, a new study says.

Traffic to sites containing low-credibility health info mainly comes from older adults, especially those who lean right politically, researchers reported recently in the journal Nature Aging.

However, there’s good news — seniors don’t find such “fake” health news as engaging as partisan political content, researchers found.

“The age effect is way bigger for politics,” said lead researcher Ben Lyons, an associate professor of communication at the University of Utah.

“People see politics as way more entertaining than they would health-related content, so there’s less of a motivation to want to share these things,” Lyons said in a news release. “You don’t get a feeling of team identity from sharing health misinformation like you would for information that puts down your political opponents.”

For the new study, researchers analyzed browsing data collected on more than 1,000 U.S. adults for a month. During that time, the participants visited nearly 10 million different web addresses, including a half-million videos on YouTube.

The web sites included 1,055 domains categorized with the "health" tag, of which about 7% trafficked in quack medical info, the study said.

In all, 13% of study participants visited a “fake” health info site during the month their browsing was tracked, and those visits made up just 3% of all health-related browsing.

“It’s sort of good news. Overall, the levels are pretty low,” Lyons said, emphasizing that only a small number of people, young and old, are drawn to dubious medical claims while surfing the web.

But the exposure tended to be highly concentrated among a small group of people, researchers found.

Results showed that 1% of users accounted for 37% of total exposure to quack health info, and 10% of users accounted for more than three-quarters (77%) of visits to those sites.

Further, those folks tended to be seniors — which makes sense, given that older adults have more health problems and would be expected to spend more time seeking out medical info online, researchers said.

“Most people are not visiting these kinds of websites,” Lyons said. “It’s older adults, in particular, those who consume more right-leaning partisan news.”

However, researchers said these seniors aren’t being guided to quack medical sites through links on partisan news media sites.

“What we found, at least in the referral data, is that it’s a more insular type of thing,” Lyons said. “They’re visiting these because they visit other low-credibility sites, they’re clicking through, and they’re spending more time on these sites. They’re going to them directly.”

The team also found that people who already believed false health claims or tended to be conspiracy-minded were more likely to browse questionable health content, suggesting their exposure isn’t random.

“Notably, the fact that exposure is highest among older adults who already believe misinformation suggests that those most at risk of health harms may not only encounter more misleading content but also be less likely to critically evaluate it,” concluded the research team in their paper.

More information

RAND has more on misinformation and seniors.

SOURCES: University of Utah, news release, Feb. 13, 2026; Nature Aging, Feb. 4, 2026