Investigating the congruence of crowdsourced information with official government data: the case of pediatric clinics.

To investigate the cause of the spread of misleading health information in the online world, we adopted a unique approach by associating mining results on hospitals from geospecific online health communities with the sociodemographic characteristics of corresponding regions. We found that the congruence of crowdsourced information on health care services varied across regions and that these variations could be explained by geospecific demographic factors. This finding can be helpful to governments in reducing the potential risk of misleading online information and the accompanying safety issues.