By Sara Heath
Will Mass General Brigham be the next internet influencer? In a new partnership with video streaming and social media platform YouTube, the healthcare organization plans to ramp up public health messaging by highlighting experts debunking medical misinformation.
MGH Brigham said this comes as part of its efforts to expand patient access to accurate and credible medical information.
“Our system is committed to providing credible, trusted information for our patients,” chief academic officer at Mass General Brigham, Ravi Thadhani, MD, MPH, said in the announcement. “By working together with a global digital platform like YouTube, we will broaden the reach of our experts and greatly expand access to trusted health information not just to those in our communities, but to all people around the world.”
Video content will cover a variety of healthcare topics, not just COVID-19 and vaccinations. Mass General Brigham said it, alongside partners at other leading healthcare organizations, will produce videos related to mRNA research, mental health, heart health, to name a few. The organization said it aims to produce multiple videos each week.
This announcement comes as the nation comes to understand the power social media has in spreading health messages, whether those messages are accurate or not. The partnership with Mass General Brigham will ideally help YouTube be a part of the solution, YouTube said. With YouTube’s massive reach, combined with the knowledge power of Mass General Brigham and its other healthcare partners, YouTube stated it hoped it could help spread accurate medical information.
“In our increasingly digital world, the next phase in health communication is video, where health care professionals can connect with patients and answer their questions in a way that is both visual and personal,” said director and global head of Healthcare and Public Health YouTube, Garth Graham. “YouTube, which has more than 2 billion monthly active users, has the potential to be a transformative tool for public health and can positively impact communities at scale.”
This also comes as YouTube rolls out other fail-safes for any health-related content published to the platform, it said. The video sharing and social media platform will be adding “health content shelves” in the coming weeks, which are a curated set of health-related videos created by an expert “health source information panel.” YouTube said the National Academies of Medicine and other expert entities will help draft the videos.
This announcement comes as the nation turns its attention toward medical misinformation and the way it spreads on social media. Late last week, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, MD, issued his first advisory calling medical misinformation a public health threat.
“Health misinformation is an urgent threat to public health. It can cause confusion, sow mistrust, and undermine public health efforts, including our ongoing work to end the COVID-19 pandemic,” Murthy said in his announcement.
“As Surgeon General, my job is to help people stay safe and healthy, and without limiting the spread of health misinformation, American lives are at risk. From the tech and social media companies who must do more to address the spread on their platforms, to all of us identifying and avoiding sharing misinformation, tackling this challenge will require an all-of-society approach, but it is critical for the long-term health of our nation.”
Data has corroborated this. In June 2021, researchers wrote in JAMA Internal Medicine that social media platform Facebook was a breeding ground for COVID-19 misinformation. The analysis looked at how the use of bots helped spread false claims about mask-wearing, revealing that Facebook groups more susceptible to bots also had more misinformation within their posts.
“COVID-19 misinformation propaganda appears to be spreading faster than the virus itself,” study coauthor and assistant professor at UC San Diego, Dr. Eric Leas said in a statement. “This is fueled by bots that can amplify misinformation at a rate far greater than ordinary users.”
Those findings suggest a need for more group post review and a tamping down of bots, both of which would likely be the responsibility of social media companies themselves.
That reflects some of Murthy’s recommendations from addressing misinformation as a public health threat. Additionally, Murthy suggested equipping citizens with the tools and knowledge necessary to parse through information and identify what may be untrue.
