Analysis of the quality, reliability, and popularity of information on strabismus on YouTube

To evaluate the quality, reliability, and popularity of YouTube videos addressing strabismus. This is a retrospective, cross-sectional, register-based study. A search was performed using the keywords strabismus, squint, eye squint, and crossed eye on YouTube, and the first 50 videos for each keyword were analyzed. The video duration, time since upload, number of total views, view ratio were recorded. Video popularity was recorded using the video power index (VPI). Video educational quality and reliability were measured using the DISCERN questionnaire, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) score, and Global Quality Score (GQS). All videos were also assigned publishers and categories. Among the 200 videos analyzed, 84 were included. The mean duration was 6.2 min, and the mean number of total views was 227,226. The mean VPI score was 189.6 +/- 1093.5 (range, 0-11631). The mean DISCERN score, JAMA score, and GQS were 42.2 +/- 15.3, 1.9 +/- 1.2, and 2.7 +/- 1.1, respectively. While the main video publishers were patients (32.1%) and ophthalmologists (28.5%), the main video categories were patient experience (35.7%) and patient information (26.1%). While the most popular videos were uploaded by a TV show/YouTube channel, the videos with the highest educational quality and reliability scores were uploaded by academic institutions. Although some videos contained sufficient information, most of the videos were rated as fair. YouTube users mostly preferred videos that were of low quality. Patients may be receiving biased information, and physicians should be aware of the type of information patients may be accessing on YouTube.