Background: Temporomandibular disorders (TMDs) affect people's quality of life greatly, and precise understanding of TMDs contributes to a proper treatment choice. Social media is an access to health information, hence it is needed to evaluate the quality of relative information on social media.
Objective: This research aims to assess the quality of information about TMDs understood by the public on two mainstream social media platforms, WeChat and Zhihu. They will be evaluated from four aspects: readability, credibility, concreteness, and accuracy.
Methods: Researchers searched for relative articles on WeChat and Zhihu and selected the samples. The readability was evaluated separately, and the DISCERN instrument was employed to evaluate the credibility and concreteness. Accuracy was measured by comparing samples with authoritative journals and textbooks. The Health On the Net code of conduct for medical and health websites (HONcode) and Global Quality Scale (GQS) were used as supplemental tools. Two researchers conducted this process independently, the intraclass correlation coefficient was used to examine the consistency.
Results: One hundred and eleven articles were included, with 47 articles from WeChat, 64 from Zhihu. For readability, the articles received a mean score of 27.79 (standard deviation (SD) 2.99) out of 35. The DISCERN instrument reported a mean score of 38.52 (SD 7.13) out of 80. As for accuracy, most articles (92 of 111) got 3.5 or more out of 5, demonstrating that the two platforms did well in this area. HONcode reported a mean score of 6.29 out of 16 (SD 1.42) while GQS showed a mean score of 2.91 out of 5 (SD 0.77), indicating the reliability needs improvements, and these articles can only provide limited help to the public.
Conclusions: The quality of TMDs-related information from WeChat and Zhihu is generally low. Although they do well on accuracy and readability, the credibility and concreteness still need further improvements. And different improvements and suggestions are recommended for uploaders and platforms.
