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Paper short abstract

Using a Turkish X community combating medical misinformation as a single case, this paper examines how platformized expertise, boundary work, and fragmented accountability reconfigure digital health communication and blur the line between health activism and health influencing.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines, as a single-case study, a digital community on X (Twitter) in Turkey that is organized around combating medical misinformation and includes many health professionals among its members. Rather than treating medical misinformation simply as the circulation of false information, the study conceptualizes it as a process through which expertise, legitimacy, and accountability are reconstituted within platform environments. The paper is based on a qualitative case study and discourse analysis of community rules, posts, and administrator content on X. Although the community presents itself as a collective initiative aimed at protecting the public from harmful health claims, content production and visibility are concentrated largely around expert accounts and administrator figures. The fact that the community’s leadership structure consists largely of physicians suggests that authority within the community is organized based on expertise. The analysis shows that expertise is performed through medical titles, citation practices, the language of evidence, and corrective interventions. Beyond circulating “accurate information,” posts also function to draw boundaries and distribute legitimacy by determining who is marked as “scientific” and who is labeled as “pseudo-scientific” or a “charlatan.” The tension between norm-setting and administrators’ refusal to assume responsibility for content reveals how platformized authority and fragmented accountability operate together. In this way, the paper discusses how X’s logics of visibility, polemic, exposure, and viral correction reshape evidence-based health communication and transform the boundaries between health activism and health influencing.