A public health nonprofit is trying to fight vaccine misinformation on social media, which has increased sharply since the COVID-19 pandemic began, according to Wired.
A number of conspiracy theories have developed during the pandemic, which may be leading some Americans to rethink taking a coronavirus vaccine when it arrives.
A video called "Plandemic," posted widely on social media in early May, put forward the conspiracy theory that the pandemic is a plot by global elites, such as Bill Gates, to use a coronavirus vaccine to insert microchips in people. A poll conducted by Yahoo News/YouGov, shows that more than one-fourth of the 1,640 respondents said they wouldn't get a vaccine in part because they believed the conspiracy theory to be true.
Public Good Projects, a public health nonprofit that uses social network analysis to implement behavioral change programs on a large scale, is trying to combat this problem. The group has created online surveillance tools to track misinformation and conspiracy theory outbreaks.
The group recently launched a vaccine advocacy campaign, "Stronger," which enlists volunteers who are then trained to block, hide and report vaccine misinformation. They are enlisting people who support vaccines and have a history of activism. The volunteers receive alerts about vaccine misinformation that is gaining momentum online, and are told what language and information would be most useful to counter the misinformation when they counterpost on social media.
"We have this tradition in the US that vaccines are solely the domain of public health workers who are trained to not get into fights," Joe Smyser, CEO of the Public Good Projects, told Wired. "I think that's a very antiquated perspective, and it's left those on the public health side completely outgunned in this new era of social media."
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