Twitter played a tremendous role in disseminating public health information during the COVID pandemic, but is coming under fire for the gatekeeping role it has played in elevating or silencing qualified voices.
Why it matters: For better or worse, many people get important information from social media, especially since the arrival of COVID-19.
“You never knew who would be the next leading voice in health care,” said Fumiko Chino, a radiation oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
- Twitter “certainly raised some voices. Some good ones that were trying to promote good public health messages, and others that weren’t promoting good evidence-based medicine,” she said.
The big picture: Last week, the social media giant admitted that its efforts to stamp out misinformation about COVID have occasionally gone awry.
- The accounts of numerous doctors, scientists and patient advocates — even those with a blue verification badge — were suspended and factual health tweets flagged as fake under the platform’s disinformation policy — a problem experts say hurts the field’s credibility. the Washington Post reported. .
- Many of the tweets have been delabeled as misinformation and suspended accounts have been reinstated, according to the Post.
- “We acknowledge the mistakes made in these cases and are reviewing our team’s protocol to protect against such mistakes in the future,” Twitter spokeswoman Celeste Carswell said in an email to Axios.
Be smart: It is an example of the difficult challenge of conveying the most accurate information from authoritative voices during a global health crisis.
- In the first months of the pandemic, Twitter said this worked with public health authorities to identify and blue-label more than 1,600 accounts belonging to experts who have been used to provide facts and guidance.
Yes but: A study led by researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering published in JAMA Network Open found that those physician-verified sources in the first year of the pandemic were much more likely to be male (71%) than female (29%).
- It also found an overrepresentation of experts from the US compared to the rest of the world.
- At the time the data was collected in November 2020, there was no transparent determination of why some accounts were verified and others were not, said Chino, a co-author of the study that took a blue verification symbol on her Twitter account at the beginning of the pandemic.
What they say: “The concern we have is that this could promote what we already know in medicine, which is that men’s voices are promoted more, elevated more and given a little more weight,” Chino said.
The other side: After a public feedback process, Twitter created a more transparent verification system in May 2021, a spokeswoman said. Those changes included adjusting the language to make it clear what each distinguished category refers to and adding criteria to different categories to earn the badge, Carswell said.
- Chino said he appreciates the clarification. But she still sees room for bias in the way Twitter ultimately determines who is considered “authentic, visible and active,” especially for doctors who must now apply under the “activists, organizers and other influential individuals” category.
- She specifically showed the example of Kim Manninga frequent public health speaker and professor of medicine at Emory with more than 100,000 followers who could not be verified.
Ultimately: It is not entirely surprising that we are seeing inequalities in society reflected on social media platforms. But it’s important that these platforms take responsibility for whose voice is broadcast, Chino said.
- “For me, it behooves me to take a good look at what I’m promoting, who I’m redefining,” Chino said. “Because on this Twitter platform, it matters.”
