Meedan is excited to announce that our ongoing project, Health Desk, was nominated for a Webby Award on April 4, 2023. We are deeply proud of this seminal achievement for our organization. 

The Webby Awards are awards recognizing excellence on the Internet. They are presented annually by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, which is a judging body of over three thousand industry experts, field leaders, and innovators. 

As a Webby Nominee, our work has been singled out as one of the five best in the world in our category: “Websites and mobile sites - responsible information.” This means that Health Desk is among the top 12% of the nearly 14,000 projects entered from across 50 U.S. states and over 70 countries. 

Meedan began its Health Desk initiative in the immediate aftermath of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, in response to an identified need of quality and accessible health content among journalists and fact-checkers covering the pandemic and other urgent health topics.

While primarily focused on providing the most up to date content on COVID-19, we have since expanded our Health Desk explainers to cover any public health trends relevant to our partners, including Monkeypox, biological warfare (especially pertaining to Russia’s war in Ukraine), and sexual and reproductive health. 

As a nominee, Health Desk is now in the running for the Internet's two most coveted awards: The Webby Award and The Webby People's Voice Award, which is voted on by the public. All winners will be announced on Tuesday, April 25, 2023.

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Health Policy and Misinformation
Footnotes
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. This method used Twitter’s historical search API
  4. 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).
  5. All our searches were case insensitive and could match substrings; so, “revers” matches “reverse”, “reversal”, etc.
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Published on
April 6, 2023
April 5, 2023