‘I get caught up in the numbers game’: why useful social media content gets lost online

The Conversation reports on a paradox in health information online: the most educational content often gets buried by algorithms designed to reward engagement. Researchers speaking with cancer survivors and others who share health experiences found that important posts about rare conditions—like Lynch syndrome, an inherited cancer risk that affects one in four hundred people but that ninety-five percent of carriers don't know they have—receive far fewer views than lighter, more eye-catching content. One woman, Amy, who posts about surviving bowel cancer and has around five thousand followers, described the frustration: a bikini photo gets thousands of views while her posts explaining the realities of living with a stoma—an opening in the abdomen for waste management—reach a much smaller audience. Social media platforms prioritize posts that generate reactions, comments, and shares, which means that engagement-friendly content can spread faster and with less fact-checking than more balanced or educational material. The research suggests that while people like Amy are filling crucial gaps for patients struggling to find information, the platform's design makes it harder for that knowledge to reach the people who need it most.

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