Exposure and Reactions to Cancer Treatment Misinformation and Advice: Survey Study

Background: Cancer treatment misinformation, or false claims about alternative cures, often spreads faster and farther than true information on social media. Cancer treatment misinformation can harm the psychosocial and physical health of individuals with cancer and their cancer care networks by causing distress and encouraging people to abandon support, potentially leading to deviations from evidence-based care. There is a pressing need to understand how cancer treatment misinformation is shared and uncover ways to reduce misinformation. Objective: We aimed to better understand exposure and reactions to cancer treatment misinformation, including the willingness of study participants to prosocially intervene and their intentions to share Instagram posts with cancer treatment misinformation. Methods: We conducted a survey on cancer treatment misinformation among US adults in December 2021. Participants reported their exposure and reactions to cancer treatment misinformation generally (saw or heard, source, type of advice, and curiosity) and specifically on social media (platform, believability). Participants were then randomly assigned to view 1 of 3 cancer treatment misinformation posts or an information post and asked to report their willingness to prosocially intervene and their intentions to share. Results: Among US adult participants (N=603; mean age 46, SD 18.83 years), including those with cancer and cancer caregivers, almost 1 in 4 (142/603, 23.5%) received advice about alternative ways to treat or cure cancer. Advice was primarily shared through family (39.4%) and friends (37.3%) for digestive (30.3%) and natural (14.1%) alternative cancer treatments, which generated curiosity among most recipients (106/142, 74.6%). More than half of participants (337/603, 55.9%) saw any cancer treatment misinformation on social media, with significantly higher exposure for those with cancer (53/109, 70.6%) than for those without cancer (89/494, 52.6%; P<.001). Participants saw cancer misinformation on Facebook (39.8%), YouTube (27%), Instagram (22.1%), and TikTok (14.1%), among other platforms. Participants (429/603, 71.1%) thought cancer treatment misinformation was true, at least sometimes, on social media. More than half (357/603, 59.2%) were likely to share any cancer misinformation posts shown. Many participants (412/603, 68.3%) were willing to prosocially intervene for any cancer misinformation posts, including flagging the cancer treatment misinformation posts as false (49.7%-51.4%) or reporting them to the platform (48.1%-51.4%). Among the participants, individuals with cancer and those who identified as Black or Hispanic reported greater willingness to intervene to reduce cancer misinformation but also higher intentions to share misinformation. Conclusions: Cancer treatment misinformation reaches US adults through social media, including on widely used platforms for support. Many believe that social media posts about alternative cancer treatment are true at least some of the time. The willingness of US adults, including those with cancer and members of susceptible populations, to prosocially intervene could initiate the necessary community action to reduce cancer treatment misinformation if coupled with strategies to help individuals discern false claims

Optimising messages and images for e-cigarette warnings

Background: The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) to have a single addiction warning, but many other health harms are associated with vaping and warnings grow stale over time. We aimed to develop new warning messages and images to discourage e-cigarette use. Methods: Participants were 1629 US adults who vaped or smoked. We randomised each participant to evaluate 7 of 28 messages on newly developed warning themes (metals exposure, DNA mutation, cardiovascular problems, chemical exposure, lung damage, impaired immunity, addiction), and the current FDA-required warning (total of 8 messages). Then, participants evaluated images of hazards (eg, metal), internal harms (eg, organ damage) or people experiencing harms. Results: Regarding intended effects, new warning themes all discouraged vaping more than the current FDA-required warning (all p&lt;0.001), led to greater negative affect (all p&lt;0.001) and led to more anticipated social interactions (all p&lt;0.001). The most discouraging warnings were about toxic metals exposure. Regarding unintended effects, the new themes led to more stigma against people who vape (6 of 7 themes, p&lt;0.001) and led to a greater likelihood of thinking vaping is more harmful than smoking (all 7 themes, p&lt;0.001), although unintended effects were smaller than intended effects. Images of harms (internal or people experiencing) discouraged vaping more than images of hazards (all p&lt;0.001). Discussion: Vaping warning policies should communicate a broader range of hazards and harms, beyond addiction, to potentially increase awareness of health harms. Images of internal harm or people experiencing harms may be particularly effective at discouraging vaping

Improving the Verification of Timed Systems Using Influence Information

Abstract. The parallel composition with observers is a well-known approach to check or test properties over formal models of concurrent and real-time systems. We present a newtechnique to reduce the size of the resulting model. Our approach has been developed for a formalism based on Timed Automata. Firstly, it discovers relevant components and clocks at each location of the observer using influence information. Secondly, it outcomes an abstraction which is equivalent to the original model up to branching-time structure and can be treated by verification tools such as Kronos [12] or OpenKronos [23]. Our experiments suggest that the approach may lead to significant time and space savings during verification phase due to state space reduction and the existence of shorter counterexamples in the optimized model.