Today the health communications organization Nigeria Health Watch and Meedan announce a partnership to counter misinformation around COVID-19 and other public health challenges in Nigeria. This partnership will take place through Meedan’s COVID-19 Expert Database.
The spread of misinformation during disease outbreaks is a global issue. False or misleading information around disease prevention, treatment and cures can can cause confusion and panic, and can be dangerous to public health. There is there an urgent need for collaboration to address widespread health misinformation as governments tackle the double epidemic of misinformation and COVID-19.
Through the partnership, potentially false or misleading COVID-19 claims will be identified, and Nigeria Health Watch will leverage Meedan’s team of experts to produce multimedia messages that debunk misinformation around the virus. The multimedia messages will include critical context and background information that is key to safely communicating debunks to misinformation. The project will apply insights from collated data to create evidence-based media campaigns to counter COVID-19 misinformation.
Managing Director at Nigeria Health Watch, Vivianne Ihekweazu, said "Misinformation poses a threat to the public response to outbreaks, eroding the public’s trust, and their willingness and ability to take preventative measures."
"As we’re learning each day, information and misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic are spreading in online ecosystems as rapidly as the virus itself is spreading around the world. Strained access to health experts during emergencies, such as the one we’re experiencing, can quickly lead to poor health outcomes, as low-quality information exacerbates the real-world spread of disease," said Nat Gyenes, Meedan Digital Health Lab lead.
About Nigeria Health Watch
Nigeria Health Watch uses informed advocacy and communication to influence health policy and seek better health and access to healthcare in Nigeria. We seek to amplify some of the great work happening in the health sector, challenge the bad, and create a space for positive ideas and action. Through its various platforms, Nigeria Health Watch is a trusted source that provides informed commentary and in-depth analysis of health issues in Nigeria, always in good conscience.
About Meedan
Meedan is a technology not-for-profit that builds software and designs human-powered initiatives for newsrooms, NGOs and academic institutions. The Digital Health Lab is our initiative that focuses on improving the quality and equity of online health information. We are researching, designing and testing a digital response framework for addressing health misinformation. Learn more at meedan.com and health.meedan.com
Footnotes
- Online conversations are heavily influenced by news coverage, like the 2022 Supreme Court decision on abortion. The relationship is less clear between big breaking news and specific increases in online misinformation.
- The tweets analyzed were a random sample qualitatively coded as “misinformation” or “not misinformation” by two qualitative coders trained in public health and internet studies.
- This method used Twitter’s historical search API
- The peak was a significant outlier compared to days before it using Grubbs' test for outliers for Chemical Abortion (p<0.2 for the decision; p<0.003 for the leak) and Herbal Abortion (p<0.001 for the decision and leak).
- All our searches were case insensitive and could match substrings; so, “revers” matches “reverse”, “reversal”, etc.
