Even before the COVID-19 pandemic there was a lot of misinformation about vaccines floating around on social media. Public health agencies have been trying to figure out what to do. It turns out that one of the most powerful remedies is also one of the simplest.
Jingwen Zhang and her team have noted that vaccine misinformation is rampant on social media, and while this often seems like an intractable problem, there’s a very simple and very effective remedy: social media stamps of approval — or disapproval — from research universities and health institutions.
Jingwen Zhang studies health promotion and social influence at the University of California Davis, where she is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication, and she’s joining us from Northern California.
