A multifaceted campaign to combat COVID-19 misinformation in the Hispanic community

Background:

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hispanic community in the United States had a higher proportion of cases compared to the Non-Hispanic White community. In addition, members of the Hispanic community were more likely to experience worse outcomes from COVID-19 due to a higher prevalence of pre-existing health conditions and smaller likelihood of having health insurance and access to healthcare. This was reflected in data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that found that, as of April 2022, Hispanic people were 2.3 times more likely to be hospitalized and 1.8 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than white people.

Program background:

Since 2021, the Public Good Projects, Hispanic Communications Network and World Voices Media have worked together on a nationwide, multifaceted campaign aimed at increasing the Hispanic community’s confidence in and uptake of the COVID-19 vaccines. For this campaign, we created a Spanish-language vaccine misinformation tracking system to detect and assess misinformation circulating in online Spanish conversations. We used our media monitoring findings to work with Hispanic social media (SM) influencers, volunteers, and celebrities to spread pro-vaccine messaging online. We created misinformation-responsive SM assets, newsletters, talking points and trainings for Hispanic-serving community-based organizations (CBOs) to help them respond to misinformation and increase vaccine uptake. We used our misinformation findings to inform the creation of mass media communications such as radio PSAs and op-eds.

Evaluation Methods and Results:

Our evaluation methods involved aggregating process metrics through software, including CreatorIQ, Meta ads and Hubspot. In the two years since the launch of the campaign, we have recruited more than 500 total paid influencers, celebrities and digital volunteers. With these, along with our social media (SM) and our partners’ SM and earned media efforts, we had a combined 15M+ impressions. Our new Spanish-language monitoring system captured and organized 33.8M Spanish posts containing COVID-19 misinformation. We held 21 events/trainings for CBOs on topics like battling misinformation and engaging influencers online, with 2,412 total attendees. In Year 2, we sent 80+ newsletters, 80+ talking points, and 160+ resources (SM assets, toolkits, videos) in English and Spanish to 630+ subscribers from community-based organizations (CBOs) to support their outreach.

Conclusions:

This project shows the proliferation of misinformation circulating in online Spanish conversations. It also shows we were effective at reaching our target audience with fact-based COVID-19 misinformation prebunk and debunk messaging.

Implications for research and/or practice:

Our project highlights a new way for practitioners to identify and respond to misinformation in their campaign development and communications content. Additionally, we identified best practices for recruiting Hispanic social media influencers to post positively about vaccinations online and strategies for evaluating the efficacy of this intervention, which other practitioners can replicate.