A picture is worth a thousand words, which isn't great when it's misinformation.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech, I'm Megan McCarty-Kirino.

Technology is making it easier and easier to create and disseminate visuals from text

to image artificial intelligence models and sophisticated deepfakes to simple memes

retweeted with a hashtag.

Visuals are the lingua franca of the internet, but their potential to easily spread misinformation,

particularly about health topics, make them especially dangerous to the public, according

to an article published last year in the journal Science Communication.

Andy King co-authored the commentary titled Missing the Bigger Picture.

He's an associate professor of communication at the University of Utah.

I asked him, what makes visual information unique?

Visual content is more likely to be shared on social media.

You're providing people heuristically with something they may buy into differently.

I think it's important also to note that not all visual content is misinformation by itself.

A picture may be an accurate photograph, but it appears in a message where it's recontextualized

with verbal information, where then the total message unit, that multimodal message unit

where there's a visual and verbal content together, is actually a misinformation sort of instance.

Are social media platforms doing enough to stop the spread of this kind of misinformation?

There's a number of challenges unique to visual content, and so, you know, memes are another

way that people can sort of convey visual information that sort of taps into something

that we know already, if we're familiar with a meme template, right?

It's signal some meaning, and then the text that gets added to that meme template might

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