Title: Establishing the Truth: Vaccines, Social Media, and the Spread of Misinformation | Executive and Continuing Professional Education | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Headings: Establishing the Truth: Vaccines, Social Media, and the Spread of Misinformation
Establishing the Truth: Vaccines, Social Media, and the Spread of Misinformation
The Relationship Between Social Media and Public Health
Treating the Source of Vaccine Misinformation
The Public Health Challenge of Communicating Vaccine Truth
An Effective Social Media Communications Strategy for Public Health Professionals

Content: We always had writers and journalists as critical gatekeepers who were able to filter some of this information. But now, because of social media, we do not have this very critical intermediary,” says Viswanath. Thus, social media has been proven to facilitate the spread of false information and risk. There are two basic types of false information that flourish: Misinformation, or inadvertently drawing conclusions based on wrong or incomplete facts
Disinformation, the deliberate spread of falsehoods to promote an agenda
The two are addressed differently—misinformation can be corrected with factual information, but disinformation requires a different, more complex strategy. Beyond public figures who use their fame to speak about subjects in which they are not experts, there are also social media influencers who spread and amplify inflammatory information through the social media megaphone. Social media can be a breeding ground for hate and intolerance around hot-button issues. Furthermore, activists can exploit fragile emotions of those impacted by the issue and provide misleading causal explanations. “A large number of them are doing this anonymously: anonymity makes them uninhibited in expressing their opinions,” explains Viswanath.