Building systems for respond to infodemics and build resilience to misinformation

Elisabeth Wilhelm, US CDC | Tina Purnat, WHO

Health misinformation and infodemics:

• Part 1 - A framework approach to infodemic management (YouTube lecture, slide deck)
• Part 2 - Key principles and tools of a framework for infodemic management (YouTube lecture, slide deck)

As we ran the First WHO infodemic manager training during November 2020, Elisabeth Wilhelm of US CDC and I often reflected on the speed by which the demand for infodemic management is increasing. We are still in the middle of a pandemic, and are experiencing an infodemic (overabundance of information, including misinformation) about COVID-19, which has clearly now experienced a second accompanying and intersecting infodemic related to COVID-19 vaccine.

During response of the last year, adhoc structures and partnerships have beeb put in place to respond to the pandemic and the accompanying infodemic. We have built on top of existing concepts of risk communication and community engagement. At the same time, we acknowledged that infodemic management requires a broader perspective, multidisciplinary and evidence-based interventions to promote community resilience to infodemics and health misinformation, and an approach that strengthens country emergency preparedness and health systems.

While the science behind infodemic management is still in its infancy, there is an urgent need to apply lessons learned and early evidence from infodemic interventions towards improving country, regional and global COVID-19 public health response. Structures must be put in place which will help countries detect, assess, report and respond to the infodemics accompanying outbreaks and public health emergencies.

What follows are some practical approaches and considerations that can strengthen infodemic management activities in context of the COVID-19 public health response. We covered these in two lectures, two weeks apart during November 2020. The slides and videos are linked above, but main takeaways are as follows:

• Infodemic management requires not just understanding of how information flows, but also understanding of cognition and behavior. If done well, infodemic management can: address harmful effects of infodemics and health misinformation; develop and maintain trust in health authorities, health service delivery, and public health response; reduce susceptibility of individuals to health misinformation and lead to healthy behavior change; reduce confusion, risk-taking and harmful attitudes and behaviors.
• Often, we make assumptions that providing people to high quality health information will be enough to achieve that they enact health behaviors - but how people receive, process and act on information is much more complicated. Effective infodemic management therefore is not just a matter of communication and technology, but must center measurement, action, interventions at person and community level, and requires community involvement in all those steps. Ultimately, we need to promote high quality health information and help people cope with the overabundance of information, we must support debunking and slow the spread of health misinformation, but also at the same time work on empowering communities to be resilient to infodemics and health misinformation.
• In order to systematically tackle the infodemic, we need an evidence-based systematic frame, like that of epidemiologists.
• Infodemic management requires partnerships across all of society - not only because of the scale of the challenge, but also because of the specifics of the information ecosystem which touches us online and offline, and affects people's behavior offline.

Key assumptions and operational environment:

• Because infodemic management is a nascent field, sometimes programme decisions or programme design is created based on limited evidence and therefore care needs to be taken that implementation includes a strong evaluation and implementation research component.
• There is a common understanding that infodemic management is not only about mis- or disinformation, but the overwhelming amounts of information that citizens are subject to, both online and offline.
• Infodemic management requires multiple skillsets, types of training which are often not found within one individual or one programme.
• Infodemic management will always operate on incomplete data that is not representative of the general population’s exposure or behaviors related to misinformation.

In the first lecture, we outline what is different now during the COVID-19 infodemic compared to previous health emergencies, and how infodemic management activities can be built into systems, building on experience of evidence based intervention implementation and evidence-informed policymaking in public health. In the second lecture, we expand on each step further, discussing main approaches and practices that can help kick us off when coming to a new country to support infodemic response.

2021 will be marked by a focus on Member States’ response to the pandemic as they operationalize deployment of COVID-19 vaccines. We will be able to support this through infodemic management tools and partnerships. As we work, we need to keep focused on building systems that will last beyond COVID-19 response and vaccine deployment. Let’s build capacity and systems for also future strengthened country preparedness.