2025/05/30 by Hayoung Jung, Jung, Hayoung, Shravika Mittal +9 · 3 citations
Computer Science · Medicine · Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutics · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Forensic Toxicology and Drug Analysis #Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC) #Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining #Substance Abuse Treatment and Outcomes
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2506.00308
openalex publication_date 2025/05/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Understanding the prevalence of misinformation in health topics online can inform public health policies and interventions. However, measuring such misinformation at scale remains a challenge, particularly for high-stakes but understudied topics like opioid-use disorder (OUD)--a leading cause of death in the U.S. We present the first large-scale study of OUD-related myths on YouTube, a widely-used platform for health information. With clinical experts, we validate 8 pervasive myths and release an expert-labeled video dataset. To scale labeling, we introduce MythTriage, an efficient triage pipeline that uses a lightweight model for routine cases and defers harder ones to a high-performing, but costlier, large language model (LLM). MythTriage achieves up to 0.86 macro F1-score while estimated to reduce annotation time and financial cost by over 76% compared to experts and full LLM labeling. We analyze 2.9K search results and 343K recommendations, uncovering how myths persist on YouTube and offering actionable insights for public health and platform moderation.