Events

Nat Gyenes, Director of Meedan’s Digital Health Lab and Kat Lo, Content Moderation Lead, lead this session to identify and explore public health content moderation challenges online.

The world now has more internet users than people with access to essential health services such as primary care, dental care, or surgery. Exacerbated through the COVID-19 pandemic, populations around the world experience limited availability of in-person health providers or services for certain health conditions, and as a result, the internet plays a crucial role in mediating access to health through access to information. However, the consequences of online health information have never been more pertinent.

In this session, we will focus on the unique role that health practitioners, experts and library systems can play in responding to related challenges. We will review existing interventions that social media platforms are deploying to try to address health misinformation at global, internet scales, the strengths and limitations of these approaches, and how physicians of the future can contribute to a healthier online information ecosystem.

Learning Objectives

• To understand the unique role that public health expertise and public health resources play in responding to online misinformation
• To examine existing infrastructures that platforms (Facebook, Google, WhatsApp) have developed for responding to misinformation
• To identify content moderation interventions that have been previously and currently employed by social media platforms to respond to different types of misinformation
• To examine the constraints and trade-offs of different moderation strategies