Supporting community partners in Georgia to track, triage, and respond to COVID-19 social media content to inform and enhance their COVID-19 response efforts. Who do different minoritized communities trust online? What content is most effective at raising vaccine confidence? What content is most harmful? How can we usefully integrate hyperlocal social media monitoring with targeted outwards health communication?
Building COVID-19 Vaccine Confidence among Black and Latinx Youth
In the US, the state of Georgia has been hard-hit by COVID-19, with Black and Latinx communities disproportionately so. Vaccine hesitancy, fueled by historical distrust in discriminatory healthcare institutions, the emerging and uncertain nature of the virus, and mis- and disinformation spreading online, has proven to be a barrier to these communities’ recovery from the pandemic. This has especially been an issue among college-aged youth, for whom vaccination rates remain relatively low.
Building on Aggie’s social media content aggregation capabilities, the T+ID team has developed a COVID-19 social media dashboard in collaboration with Project PEACH and GEORGIA CEAL. The dashboard allows users to monitor COVID-related content from a curated list of social media accounts relevant to the communities we are working with, emphasizing local content. The aim is for social media monitoring to inform community representatives’ outreach efforts to their peers. The T+ID team is exploring new social media analytic methods to improve tracking, identifying relevant content, and assessing message impact. We are also developing tools in the dashboard to assist partners in crafting a social media-based response.