Description

Social media has accelerated the spread of vaccine misinformation leading to decreased immunization rates and increased preventable deaths in the US and globally. The health impact of misinformation is particularly critical to understand and address when considering the lives of minoritized racial and ethnic groups who are often the target of misinformation campaigns or who may not have easy access to culturally relevant and language-concordant reputable sources. Although access to vaccines remains a significant barrier, vaccine safety confidence is a significant predictor of influenza and COVID vaccination in Hispanic adults. Yet, little is known about how misinformation narratives emerge specifically in relation to Hispanic communities, how they are disseminated, and how they ultimately affect people's decision to get vaccinated.

Social media posts that include personal narratives are more effective at communicating reliable health recommendations, especially those that come from a trusted peer. Therefore, communication strategies that leverage community and interpersonal relationships can prove extremely effective at debunking misinformation about vaccines. Promotores de salud are trusted community members who serve as links between health/social services and a community to improve access to health services and quality of service delivery. Promotores can diffuse and address misinformation in their communities and can be essential to debunk myths, increase trust, and improve health outcomes. Promotores have been at the forefront of addressing disparities in COVID testing and vaccine uptake. Promotores de salud are uniquely positioned as trusted messengers to debunk vaccine misinformation through strategic use of social media and infodemiology principles.

Dime La VerDAD (Verify, Debunk, and Disseminate) is an innovative social media capacity-building program based on theoretical frameworks related to health communication that empowers promotores de salud to debunk vaccine misinformation through the use of personal narratives on social media. To date, there has been no evaluation of whether training promotores de salud to identify and debunk misinformation on social media can improve uptake of accurate scientific information. Dime La VerDAD (Verify, Debunk, and Disseminate) will evaluate how debunking misinformation is perceived on social media, and discern how these can lead to changes in opinions and behavior. The proposed work will use a rigorous stepped wedge design to:

1. Identify and evaluate promotores' use of social media to disseminate vaccine information in the Hispanic community. Investigators will conduct focus groups and key informant interviews with promotores de salud recruited through Illinois Unidos partnerships to verify their peers' information sources about vaccines, vaccine-related misbeliefs, perceptions of vaccine safety, and personal plans to get vaccinated.
2. Engage Promotores de Salud as community champions in an adapted science communication curriculum so they can learn to identify and debunk misinformation. Participants will learn how to make their own infographics to debunk misinformation as well as incorporate their personal narratives into posts. Promotores will also recruit members of their social media circles to participate as subjects to test the effectiveness of their posts.
3. Test effectiveness of personal-narrative posts versus resharing of standardized debunking content shared by promotores de salud to their social networks. Using a stepped-wedge approach, members of promotores' social media circles will be surveyed to measure the reach and effectiveness of various types of social media posts. Investigators hypothesize that community champions will be viewed as trusted messengers within their social circles and that debunking posts with personal narrative using principles from the training program will be disseminated, viewed, and recalled more often as compared to a standard post without personal narrative and lead to increased COVID and influenza vaccination uptake.

This work will test a model of community engagement and empowerment while providing greater knowledge of how credible scientific information can be shared and effect positive changes in opinions and behavior.