The Platformization of Digital Health Information and Older Adults’ Credibility Judgement: an Everyday Information Practices Study in Hong Kong

Author Information

Saofen Ding, Hong Kong Baptist University, China
Wan Ping Lee, Hong Kong Baptist University, China

Abstract

The platformization of health information has fundamentally reshaped how knowledge is accessed and validated, presenting older adults with unique challenges in navigating credibility. Existing research often conceptualises credibility as a static psychological judgment or as an intention to adopt, overlooking its dynamic construction in everyday use. Adopting an Everyday Information Practices lens, this study investigates how credibility is negotiated across multi-platform environments through in-depth interviews with older adults and experts in social services and IT in Hong Kong. The findings reveal that older adults primarily access health information through incidental exposure on social media and messaging apps. Faced with uncertainty, they do not seek absolute truth; instead, they establish credibility through low-commitment experimentation and experiential consistency checks. Furthermore, the study identifies an infrastructural mismatch. While official digital health platforms possess institutional authority, their design logic, emphasising high accountability and precision, conflicts with older adults’ everyday practice logic, leading to practical exclusion. This article reconceptualises credibility as a situated, everyday practice, illuminating older adults’ situated agency and calling for a move beyond the deficit perspective of ageing toward practice-centred technology design.

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