COVID-19 shined light on new opportunities for public health on social media

When social media companies like Facebook and YouTube were founded, it’s a good bet that their founders didn’t imagine themselves to be creating public health tools. But in the face of a global pandemic, it’s become obvious that that’s exactly what they created.

And as far as health leaders at these companies are concerned, that’s a good thing.

“As someone who’s been in public health for about 20 years, the idea that public health had just been in silos and institutions and government entities and now needed to be in people’s communities and hearts and minds really required a transformation in message delivery,” said Dr. Garth Graham, YouTube’s head of global health partnerships.

“And I think that’s a lot of what you’ve seen through all of our various activities.”

Graham joined Facebook head of health KX Jin and Darius Walker of CBS for a panel discussion during the HIMSS21 Digital Conference – an UpNext Session moderated by yours truly.

In a pandemic, public health communication to the public can’t afford to wait for the usual scientific publication timetable, Graham explained.

“Normally it takes years for public health to go from bench to bedside or bench to community,” he said. “This was science happening in real time. Part of what happened here was the real-time transmission of science in a really discrete way. And that’s where platforms like ours were instrumental, because people weren’t waiting for the data to be published.”

But with that opportunity came a great responsibility, for traditional media as well as new media. Walker said that the keys for CBS were consistency, credibility and spotlighting local reporters.

“Mainly what we want to do is make sure we have consistency in our messaging, and that’s why we have certain individuals that we put on constantly and consistently to make sure we’re giving the audience the right information and clarifying a lot,” Walker said.

“We cover big stories all the time, but we knew this one was going to continue, so we marked out a game plan that had consistency.”

Social media is as the name says, primarily social, so both Graham and Facebook’s Jin reported that leveraging that aspect was important.

“One of the most effective strategies we found was amplifying content from people you know and trust who are wearing masks, and that performed better than just information,” Jin said.

Facebook also saw a lot of success with WhatsApp, the company’s popular chat software, in disseminating information in both the early and late stages of the pandemic. In Singapore, 20% of the population signed up for real-time WhatsApp updates from their local government. And in Indonesia, 500,000 healthcare workers used WhatsApp to sign up for vaccinations in the first five days of their availability.

Jin says Facebook is following a three-pronged approach to promoting vaccination: making it easy for people who already want to get vaccinated to do so, helping people learn more about the vaccine in order to feel comfortable (which included a partnership with the World Health Organization), and making it easier for people to share their vaccination status or support of the vaccine.

At CBS, Walker says that trusted local reporters have been important to encouraging vaccination.

“We had to talk to the audience about the basics of the vaccine so that they’re comfortable with it and willing to think about getting it,” he said. “But then it’s about that on-the-ground information, telling people where to go and get it. And that’s where the local reporters were really important. They trust them.”

As well as educating about the virus and the vaccine, Jin and Graham also faced the problem of proliferating vaccine misinformation. To address that issue, though, it wasn’t enough to simply block misinformation.

“Misinformation is plucking out the weeds, but you have to replace it with something that people are looking for,” Graham said. “You have to make sure the garden is supplied with engaging information.”

Jin agrees.

“Starting January 30th, we updated our policies to remove content that was debunked by public health experts and could also cause harm, and I think this point we’ve removed over 18 million pieces of content across Facebook and Instagram,” he said. “[But] just removing this information alone isn’t going to address the need. A big part of the long-term solution is connecting people to accessible, trustworthy information so we can get those questions answered.”

That’s the public health promise of modern social media, the panelists said: a chance to offer real-time, visually friendly, socially amplified public information about everything from social distancing to mRNA vaccines.

“That’s one thing we should never go back to,” Graham said. “We should continue to be able to use all of the experiences we have about translating science to communities and think about doing that for other things. Do that for hypertension, for coronary heart disease. We have an opportunity to keep up the momentum.”

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