APDIM_Combating_Misinformation

Editor's Notes

• #2: Thank you so much for having me
• #3: Excited and honored to be here, Thank you especially to Dr Awar, Dr Mourad, and the Conference Planning Committee. I have no disclosures.
• #4: Excited and honored to be here, Thank you especially to Dr Awar, Dr Mourad, and the Conference Planning Committee. I have no disclosures.
• #5: I’d like to discuss three ways in which you can train your residents to combat health misinformation. How they act in the clinic, online, and as a residency program
• #6: Let’s go to the clinic first, where I will give you 5 teaching tips
• #7: Tip 1: Target the right audience, my residents would like to know where best to spend their time and effort
• #8: Vaccine hesitancy is different than the anti-vax movement. Anti-vaxxers refuse all vaccines including childhood vaccines. Vaccine hesitant individuals live in the middle of this continuum of vaccine acceptance, in which they may refuse or delay certain vaccines but not all vaccines. Misinformation clearly impacts vaccine hesitant people who believe seemingly believable information that they heard from a family member, or on a podcast, or at work, or at church. And these are trusted sources, so the information is therefore trusted. Even knowing that there are vaccine advocates and anti-vaxxers is enough to confuse and can prolong hesitancy.
• #9: How do you know if your patient is vaccine hesitant or a vaccine denier? Ask
• #10: This brings us to Tip 2. Meet people where they are at. Approach these conversations from a place of partnership and empathy
• #11: Tip 3 is to personalize the message. Initially, we thought that we could convince young healthy people to get vaccinated as a civic duty to protect their neighbors. This is an approach that was used by many religious leaders and politicians. Research now suggests that those who would be swayed by such arguments have likely already been vaccinated. Now it is time to personalize the message with you statements.
• #12: Tip 4: Simply explain how misinformation happens. It is confusing for patients when they hear misinformation from otherwise trusted individuals and you can’t simply say “you’re wrong”… there needs to be some dialogue and explanation
• #13: Before I close this section I would like to point out an interesting paper by Sheng et al in AEM Education and Training from last year in which they suggest that the clinical spaces in which we counsel patients should be treated like our classrooms, using known educational frameworks such as…
• #14: The final teaching tip is a misinformation debunking strategy that has 6 steps
• #16: So, when in the clinic, teach your residents to combat health misinformation using my motivational interviewing, the principles of which underpin my 5 teaching tips
• #17: Now lets turn to combating health misinformation online
• #18: So who’s to blame for misinformation? There are many fingers that can be pointed, but certainly social media companies are somewhat culpable. In one study, over half of all information considered misinformation originated on social media platforms. Misinformation is propagated online at lightning speeds, due in part to the search algorithms that push such content to certain users, trapping them in an information bubble where new content enters but no new ways of thinking or facts.
• #19: And trusted individuals in our society, politicians, professional athletes, and celebrities are a huge source of misinformation. This is Joe Rogen, he has the number 1 podcast on Spotify, and he routinely has guests on his show that misinform his millions of listeners about the covid vaccine. Celebrities garner 70% of user attention on social media platforms and account for 20% of misinformation in our society. And they go unchecked by many platforms who live and die by user activity. If the users want to follow celebrities online, it isn’t in the best interests of social media companies to ban or censor them when they are discussing clear falsehoods about the virus or the vaccine.
• #22: Many of you likely have concerns about engaging about these issues in the social media space…
• #23: Like anything, the more training that you have, the more comfortable that you can become… today is the start of a conversation…
• #25: Much like our 6 step debunking method for the clinic, there is a 5 step method for combating misinformation online
• #26: Here is an example. This is the rapper Nicki Minaj, who has 24.4 million Twitter followers. She tweeted last fall, during the height of the public discourse on vaccines and hesitancy… Leave it to the Aussies, they responded immediately with…
• #27: Tito’s vodka followed the formula. They included a source, offered an alternate explanation, repeated the correct information in two places in their tweet, responded immediately…
• #28: Examples on Instagram from Stanford in the lead up to the INFODEMIC conference
• #29: 2020 was a dark year for me and my students, we decided to do something more productive than simply rage tweet. We wrote a grant to an ethics foundation and they funded us to put a conference called INFODEMIC, last August, who went, why, etc. From this conference came two papers that I will share with you
• #30: The WHO offers a comprehensive and actionable definition of an infodemic…
• #32: My colleagues and I published an editorial earlier this year in which we define the covid-19 infodemic
• #33: My colleagues and I published an editorial earlier this year in which we define the covid-19 infodemic
• #34: My colleagues and I published an editorial earlier this year in which we define the covid-19 infodemic
• #38: So to summarize my remarks about combating health misinformation online, I recommend you lean in and teach residents how to use their platform, or prepare them to do so responsibly when they leave your program. I’m not suggesting you send them out to go rouge, instead work with them as they experiment with a professional facing social media account
• #44: Over 3 month period created appx 60 one minute Tiktoks based on new literature of the day and had 600,000 views
• #45: Chicago, Chinese speaking community, WeChat, health resources
• #47: A year later, in summer 2021, the scale of COVID misinformation was staggering, exploding from mistrust and distrust of health officials during vaccination campaigns. This led to our Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy (an internist by the way, who trained at the Brigham) to declare health misinformation a public health crisis. And by that time, about 8 months after the first vaccines were given, we knew a lot more about the US population, who was and wasn’t getting vaccinated, and misinformation in general. We know that misinformation directly affects vaccination rates by increasing vaccine hesitancy, leading to preventable deaths.
• #49: GOAL: Target the right audience
• #50: GOAL: Target the right audience
• #51: GOAL: Target the right audience
• #54: Excited and honored to be here, Thank you especially to Dr Awar, Dr Mourad, and the Conference Planning Committee. I have no disclosures.
• #55: Excited and honored to be here, Thank you especially to Dr Awar, Dr Mourad, and the Conference Planning Committee. I have no disclosures.