Mobilizing a Network of Health Communicators to Investigate and Respond to Online Abuse

Dr. Jaigris Hodson is co-applicant on a New Frontiers in Research Grant led by Dr. Heidi Tworek (University of British Columbia) to research accurate and effective health communication.

Accurate and effective health communication is critical to address the COVID-19 pandemic and other public health challenges. Health communicators, from public health officials to university-based experts, have used social media innovatively to engage broad publics and specific communities, as the NPI showed in a major research project on Covid communication in 9 countries (Tworek et al., 2020). These efforts respond to what the World Health Organization (2020) and researchers call as an "infodemic" of health misinformation (Gallotti et al., 2020; Gruzd & Mai, 2020). Unfortunately, health communicators often face abuse or threats (Clark, 2021; Cody, 2021; Ferrara et al., 2020; Rozsa, 2021; Smith & Wanless, 2020). A global survey by Nature of scientists who discussed the pandemic on news media or social media found over two-thirds faced negative messaging, 22% received threats of physical or sexual violence, and 15% received death threats (Nogrady, 2021). Many Canadian news articles document online abuse of health communicators (Caulfield, 2021; Daflos, 2021; Kirkey, 2020; Kwong, 2021; O'Dette, 2021). This abuse may drive communicators from social media, and such chilling effects more commonly affect women and members of marginalized ethnic, racial, and gender minorities (Penney, 2020; Posetti et al., 2021; Schild et al., 2020).

The NPI is running a SSHRC-funded pilot study of online harassment of health communicators and its negative consequences, especially for members of marginalized ethnic, racial, and gender groups. This research, with our partner organization Institute for Strategic Dialogue, includes in-depth interviews and computational analysis of millions of tweets and YouTube comments directed at close to Canadian health communicators. It will be the first systematic study on the issue in Canada.

However, our research has faced major challenges. We aim to overcome these by mobilizing a new community of practice and prototyping new methods of participatory action research to investigate hidden forms of harassment and develop practical responses.