Can We Trust the Health Information We Find Online?

Abstract

The Internet is becoming increasingly an important source of information for people who are seeking healthcare information. Users do so without professional guidance and may lack sufficient knowledge and training to evaluate the validity and quality of health web content. This is particularly problematic in the era of Web 2.0. Hence, the main goal of this research is to propose an approach to infer user reputation based on social interactions. Reputation is a social evaluation towards a person or a group of people. The results show that our rank methodology and the network topology succeeded in achieving user reputation. The results also show that centrality measures associated with the weighted ties approach suitably controls suitably the ranking of nodes.