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Help Us Raise Awareness During Young Women's Reproductive Health Awareness Month (September 2026)
Misinformation online can take shape in multiple formats.
A central factor in the effectiveness of online misinformation is its pervasiveness, which allows it to gain trust by approaching audiences through a multitude of content forms. It is easier to believe information when it is consistently being told by different people, videos, articles, and posts.
Understanding common misleading content alongside HOW misinformation appears online can help you distinguish credible and non-credible messages.
TESTIMONIALS
What Are Testimonials?
What Are Testimonials?
Videos in which individuals, usually women, are sharing their negative personal experiences with birth control and/or their positive personal experiences foregoing birth control, which has led them to encourage others to not use birth control. In addition, the videos often look informally made. The background in the videos often seem personal to the speaker, as if they are inviting you into their lives, and are also familiar to viewers: a bedroom inside a home, a library, a park. The videos often capture a close-up of the person's face while they speak.
Why are They Misleading?
Why are They Misleading?
Testimonials draw their evidence for advising others to forego birth control based on singular personal experiences that do not align with widespread trends and/or peer reviewed scientific studies. Offering this advice to all other women based on your singular experience as a woman also overlooks the many ways that bodies and experiences differ.
How are They Effective?
How are They Effective?
The speaker, and their setting, make viewers feel like they are "real people" and "like me." They are women speaking to women. This makes the speakers seem more trustworthy and believable. We often listen to people who we believe share similar identities and experiences.
How to Identify Misleading Testimonials?
How to Identify Misleading Testimonials?
Ask yourself:
am I listening more closely to this person and/or do I have more faith in what they are saying because I identify with them as a person?
do all people who are women have the same kinds of bodies and experiences?
are they trying to sell me a product?
Follow up on what testimonials are saying by checking out secondary sources:
ask other women in your life that you trust to share their experiences
ask your doctor(s)
visit Contraception: an international reproductive health journal with peer reviewed articles
visit Planned Parenthood's birth control education page
ADVERTISEMENTS
What Are Advertisements?
What Are Advertisements?
Advertisements are posts, videos, images, and blogs whose goal is to sell their product or service for a profit.
Influencers that are sponsored by specific brands are selling you a product when they include these products in their videos. Advertisements like these are similar to testimonials and can often be categorized together. These products include foods or non-approved medicines for fertility, products that "balance female hormones", or mood and energy boosting products specifically for the female body.
These advertisements shame and condemn hormonal birth control as the root issue for health concerns and encourages a "natural approach" to health.
Why are They Misleading?
Why are They Misleading?
Advertisements draw their information from common testimonials or experiences of women to offer fast solutions.They target specific experiences revolving around reproductive health that women have been dismissed for or ignored. Advertisements use your experiences against you to sell their product as an answer to your questions.
How are They Effective?
How are They Effective?
The products being sold in these advertisements prey on the audience's insecurities. Reproductive health can be a sensitive topic, and the products aim to work as a "cure-all" for what the audience is searching for a solution. These advertisements also create new insecurities for the audience, making claims about health that the audience was otherwise unaware of or now feels inclined to fix. The shame that advertisements create causes feelings of inadequacy for the audience, ultimately villainizing normal bodies, functions, and healthcare like hormonal contraception.
How to Identify Misleading Advertisements?
How to Identify Misleading Advertisements?
Ask yourself:
are they trying to sell me a product?
what is the problem that the product is claiming to solve?
is the product claiming to be some sort of cure?
does the product seem to be targeting an issue I have been experiencing in real life?
if the influencer was not getting paid, would they still post about this product?
Follow up on advertisements by checking out secondary sources:
has the product gone through rounds of testing? has it been FDA approved?
do any board certified doctors reccomend this product? not just influencers?
ask your doctor(s)
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