Differences in Fear and Negativity Levels Between Formal and Informal Health-Related Websites: Analysis of Sentiments and Emotions

Background: Searching for web-based health-related information is frequently performed by the public and may affect public behavior regarding health decision-making. Particularly, it may result in anxiety, erroneous, and harmful self-diagnosis. Most searched health-related topics are cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and infectious diseases. A health-related web-based search may result in either formal or informal medical website, both of which may evoke feelings of fear and negativity. Objective: Our study aimed to assess whether there is a difference in fear and negativity levels between information appearing on formal and informal health-related websites. Methods: A web search was performed to retrieve the contents of websites containing symptoms of selected diseases, using selected common symptoms. Retrieved websites were classified into formal and informal websites. Fear and negativity of each content were evaluated using 3 transformer models. A fourth transformer model was fine-tuned using an existing emotion data set obtained from a web-based health community. For formal and informal websites, fear and negativity levels were aggregated. t tests were conducted to evaluate the differences in fear and negativity levels between formal and informal websites. Results: In this study, unique websites (N=1448) were collected, of which 534 were considered formal and 914 were considered informal. There were 1820 result pages from formal websites and 1494 result pages from informal websites. According to our findings, fear levels were statistically higher (t2753=3.331; P<.001) on formal websites (mean 0.388, SD 0.177) than on informal websites (mean 0.366, SD 0.168). The results also show that the level of negativity was statistically higher (t2753=2.726; P=.006) on formal websites (mean 0.657, SD 0.211) than on informal websites (mean 0.636, SD 0.201). Conclusions: Positive texts may increase the credibility of formal health websites and increase their usage by the general public and the public's compliance to the recommendations. Increasing the usage of natural language processing tools before publishing health-related information to achieve a more positive and less stressful text to be disseminated to the public is recommended.