CUGH 2022 Satellite Session: Harnessing Social Media and Digital Platforms to Improve Health Outcomes

On March 25, 2022, The Bay Area Global Health Alliance and Sabin Vaccine Institute, partners of the Alliance for Advancing Health Online, held a multipart satellite session at CUGH 2022 to discuss harnessing social media and digital platforms to improve health outcomes. 

The opening fireside chat featured representatives from The Rockefeller Foundation's Mercury Project, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Tech Task Force, the World Bank, and the University of the Valley of Guatemala. Jen Siler, Vice President of Global Community Engagement at the Sabin Vaccine Institute asked the panelists to share learnings from their recent work to further vaccine confidence and list key challenges that lie ahead. 

A crucial learning was that tailoring digital health interventions and communications to the local context results in the greatest impact. 

“Cultural approaches to who communicates and who has the ability to communicate locally have taught us that the new interventions have to be designed by making alliances with the local communities and local groups.” – Mónica Berger González, Anthropologist, University of the Valley of Guatemala 

“The ability to customize a message to the right person, addressing their concerns at the right time, is tremendous. We find that the impact of changing their intentions to get vaccinated can almost double if that group gets the right message.” – Renos Vakis, Lead Economist, eMBeD, World Bank

Panelists also spoke about the role of human behavior in shaping health outcomes and the need to better understand the intertwining of online and offline behavior.

“Human behavior both fuels outbreaks and it also can fight outbreaks. The accurate, trusted information is fundamental in helping communities make informed decisions to protect themselves and their loved ones in emergency settings such as COVID-19.” – Estelle Willie, Director, Health Policy and Communications, The Rockefeller Foundation

“We fundamentally don’t understand how human behavior is impacted by today’s information ecosystem. How does information found online and offline come together to impact a person’s decision-making abilities?” – Estelle Willie, Director, Health Policy and Communications, The Rockefeller Foundation

The value of working closely with health workers was a recurring theme in the conversation. As health workers are often the most trusted source of health information, panelists emphasized that addressing this group’s concerns about vaccines and empowering them to share accurate information on social media is key.

“Health workers are humans like everybody else, and therefore, their attitudes to the vaccine more or less mirror that of the rest of the population.” –  Renos Vakis, Lead Economist, eMBeD, World Bank

“We’ve pulled together 100+ healthcare workers who are on social media and every week we send them talking points. We don’t ask them to act as ambassadors for us (WHO) or speak our name, but we send them what the public health pressure points are at the moment.” – Andy Pattison, Team Lead of Digital Channels, WHO

Watch the opening panel (3:00 min to 1:18:32)

The fireside chat was followed by a presentation by Kate Hopkins, Director of Research, Vaccine Acceptance & Demand at Sabin Vaccine Institute. Kate shared policy, program, and practice insights for community action from Sabin’s VARN conference. 

Watch Kate Hopkins' presentation (1:20:22 to 1:36:01)

Four grantees of the Alliance for Advancing Health Online’s Vaccine Confidence Fund gave lightning talks about their research over the last year. 

Mayya Kelova of Minority Rights Group International looked at how diverse, ethnic, religious, and linguistic communities discuss COVID-19 vaccines on social media. Minority Rights Group found that in Algeria, the inaccessibility of information in the Tamazight language was a major issue.

“The Tamazight language wasn’t present there. While on the other hand, for Arabic and French, the amount of information on the COVID-19 vaccine was equally available. This leads to the point that not having this kind of accessibility of information for minority communities makes it really difficult to tackle misinformation.” – Mayya Kelova, DIVE Programme Coordinator, Minority Rights Group International

Anastasia Mirzoyants of Shujaaz Inc spoke about how trusted brands on social media empower young users to further vaccine uptake and combat misinformation offline. Anastasia shared a key learning to inform a successful communications campaign.

“In a short and intense campaign, it’s really important to be clear about what you are talking about with young people, but at the same time, not be very aggressive. Because once you become aggressive, they become aggressive in return and they say ‘we suspect that you’re paid by somebody to talk about that, that somebody might be the government’ so it’s very easy to lose trust with young people.” – Anastasia Mirzoyants, Senior Technical Advisor, Shujaaz Inc

Theresa Tang of 19 To Zero explained how natural language processing can be used to analyze vaccine attitudes on social media and create vaccine confidence messaging for vulnerable communities. 19 To Zero’s analysis revealed that addressing COVID-19 vaccine misinformation can have a far-reaching impact on vaccine attitudes.

“When you influence anti-public health or anti-vaccine accounts and you actually address that misinformation, we’re already starting to see correlations of positive impacts across multiple vaccines. Yes, absolutely we should adopt strategies, but we’re also seeing that crossover across vaccines.” – Theresa Tang, Co-founder and COO, 19 to Zero

Finally, Anne Kraemer of Maya Health Alliance discussed ways that trusted messengers and social networks in indigenous Guatemalan communities combat COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. Kraemer explains that findings about the importance of centering the local context shaped the development of digital health interventions.

“Our Wuqu' Kawoq team worked closely with graphic artists at Stanford’s Digital Medic to create engaging, informative education that resonates with the local populations. At Digital Medic, they used a community-based human-centered design approach to really create health education content for the community.” – Anne Kraemer, Executive Director at Maya Health Alliance, Wuqu' Kawoq

Watch the Vaccine Confidence Fund grantees’ presentations (1:36:20 to 2:28:27)

The session closed with an interactive audience Q&A that focused on shaping the next research agenda in the vaccine confidence space. To share your ideas for this research agenda, complete this survey.