research-article

Fostering Engagement of Underserved Communities with Credible Health Information on Social Media

Authors:

Mustafa Naseem,

Namoos Hayat Qasmi,

Sacha St-Onge Ahmad,

Sarojini Hirshleifer,

Aditya VashisthaAuthors Info & Claims

WWW '22: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022

Pages 3718 - 3727

https://doi.org/10.1145/3485447.3512267

Published: 25 April 2022 Publication History

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated rapid top-down dissemination of reliable and actionable information. This presents unique challenges in engaging low-literate communities that live in poverty and lack access to the Internet. We describe the design and deployment of a voice-based social media platform, accessible over simple phones, for actively engaging such communities in Pakistan with reliable COVID information. We developed three strategies to overcome users’ hesitation, mistrust, and skepticism in engaging with COVID content. Users were: (1) encouraged to listen to reliable COVID advisory, (2) incentivized to share authentic content with others, and (3) prompted to critically think about COVID-related information behaviors. Using a mixed-methods evaluation, we show that users approached with all three strategies had a significantly higher engagement with COVID content compared to others. We discuss how new designs of social media can enable users to engage with and propagate authentic information.

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Cited By

Doyle TVershaw SConboy EHalverson C(2024)Improving Social Media-Based Support Groups for the Rare Disease Community: Interview Study With Patients and Parents of Children with Rare and Undiagnosed DiseasesJMIR Human Factors10.2196/5783311(e57833)Online publication date: 30-Dec-2024
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Fostering Engagement of Underserved Communities with Credible Health Information on Social Media
1. Human-centered computing

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

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cover image ACM Conferences

WWW '22: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022

April 2022

3764 pages

ISBN:9781450390965

DOI:10.1145/3485447

Editors:
Frédérique Laforest
INSA Lyon, France
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Raphaël Troncy
EURECOM, France
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Elena Simperl
King’s College London, UK
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Deepak Agarwal
Pinterest, USA
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Aristides Gionis
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
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Ivan Herman
W3C / retired
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Lionel Médini
Université Lyon 1, France

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Published: 25 April 2022

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Cited By

Doyle TVershaw SConboy EHalverson C(2024)Improving Social Media-Based Support Groups for the Rare Disease Community: Interview Study With Patients and Parents of Children with Rare and Undiagnosed DiseasesJMIR Human Factors10.2196/5783311(e57833)Online publication date: 30-Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.2196/57833
Saif AZakir MRaza ANaseem M(2024)EvolveUI: User Interfaces that Evolve with User ProficiencyProceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/3674829.3675078(230-237)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3674829.3675078
Zhang YZong RShang LZeng HYue ZWang DChua TNgo CKa-Wei Lee RKumar RLauw H(2024)SymLearn: A Symbiotic Crowd-AI Collective Learning Framework to Web-based Healthcare Policy Adherence AssessmentProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645519(2497-2508)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589334.3645519
Huang CWang LHan X(2023)Vertical Federated Knowledge Transfer via Representation Distillation for Healthcare Collaboration NetworksProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202310.1145/3543507.3583874(4188-4199)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3543507.3583874

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