Antivaxxers and technology: solving health misinformation with publishers and platforms
The rise of new technology has meant that the pace of change is often quicker than the public’s ability to accept those changes. Perhaps the most prominent example of that over the past few years has been that of the news industry, where the proliferation of free news sources online and the sluggish response to that from traditional publishers has led to a situation where one in three people avoid the news completely, and accusations of ‘fake news’ and bias run riot in public discourse.
The Drum x WPP panel in Cannes 2019
But while that issue has huge implications for the health of a democracy and publishers’ ability to hold power to account, the disruption of other industries has implications for the health of individuals too. The medical industry is just as exposed to disruption as any other and the challenge is in harnessing that disruption to better serve the public. This was the topic of discussion at The Drum Arms panel, at Cannes Lions - Digital health rewired: lessons for the healthcare sector
The Drum’s executive editor Sonoo Singh introduced the panel, noting that it included both “the disrupted and the disruptees.”
Identifying herself as the “disruptee”, Eleanor Mills, the editorial director for the Sunday Times, talked about how the newspaper has changed how it serves information up to an ever-more digitally savvy audience.
“What happens in the digital world is that you tend to go deeper into a niche, and what’s good about newspapers that leafing through it you may find things you never knew you were interested in. The challenge for us is to keep some of that serendipity but to give people more of what they want. We have a new AI butler who will serve you up more of the personalised content based on what you’ve looked at, but we’re very keen within our editions to have that discoverability… it’s trying to have it both ways,” she said.
She cited that recent launch of the Times & Sunday Times’ AI butler tool - James - as an example of how technology can be deployed, invisibly and behind the scenes, to better serve up personalised content. The importance of personalisation when it comes to getting audiences to buy-in to the content that is being served up was re-iterated by the chief executive of WPP Health Practice, Claire Gillis.
“It's only interesting and you're only passionate if something bad's gonna happen. There was a study that was done that said people were more likely to pay for oncology drugs if it were for their brother, sister, parent child than they were for themselves. So, it's about who it's impacting, how much it's impacting and whether it actually feels real. We all know smokers, for example, who don't stop even though on the packets that got the dreadful pictures.”
Health and misinformation
The use of algorithms to serve up more relevant content that is in the public interest was mentioned by Yanis Dosios, head of global operations and emerging businesses for Twitter, particularly where the social platform has been accused of being a vector for misinformation around the ill-founded anti-vaccination lobby:
“The number one priority for the entire company is health. And by health I... mean specifically the health of the public conversation. That means a combination of, uh, eliminating or reducing greatly misinformation on the platform, but also eliminating the cases of abuse or people getting bullied or made to feel uncomfortable about being on the platform. So that's a huge area of focus for a company with a lot of resources and it's a combination of a few things.
One is AI, so a very big investment in artificial intelligence both through acquisitions but also through internal teams where we identify problematic content [to be] eliminated even before anyone complains about it. The other thing that we're doing is a very active investment in the number of people that are actively monitoring content to try to address this issue.”
Dosios described work that has been undertaken by Twitter to point people towards accurate information delivered by trusted sources around vaccinations as an example of how an automated process can help protect the public.
Despite the investment in AI tools across both publisher and platform, the increased visibility of the anti-science movement is testament to how difficult it actually is to solve the issue. Gillis expanded on why disruption and automation is often harmful for the public when it comes to vital areas like healthcare:
“When you look at some of the algorithms that we have in Europe, actually they push people down the decision tree or down the algorithm that kind of gets you to the wrong place.”
Trust over all
Each member of the panel was keen to stress their belief that the re-establishment of trusted sources of news would, to some extent, help ameliorate those issues. Mills noted that many of the digital pure-plays or younger publications who rely on personalisation to lead users deeper and deeper into a niche to keep them from leaving the platform end up gradually pushing more and more extreme misinformation onto their audience. By contrast, she said, papers with a history of providing a more balanced view can provide personalised content without falling into the same trap.
She cited the resurgence of discredited former British doctor and anti-vaccination activist Andrew Wakefield as evidence of the dangers of unchecked internet publishing: “A little information can be a really dangerous thing. We've seen people taking a half-baked scientific study and extrapolating out of it all sorts of scary things and that's really what happened with with antivaxxers and the crazy doctor Andrew. At the Sunday Times we outed him as a total charlatan with his views based on absolutely nothing 10, 15 years ago and then he moved to America and started doing it again and because of the Internet everyone started going down the wormholes again.”
In answer to a question from the audience about whether Twitter - and by extension other platforms with commercial considerations - are disincentivised to deal with the issue, Dosios argued that since Twitter works as a megaphone for publishers, it demonstrates that collaboration with publishers is a potential solution. At the same time, he also noted that the platform’s ability to foster collaboration is one of its great strengths: “So one of the things that we're trying to do very much is to invest more in conversation by shifting from following individual people to following interests, and trying to invite conversation between people with opposing views.”
Ultimately the proof of the success of the endeavours from both disruptors and the disrupted will be in whether they can encourage the public to seek out trusted sources of information, concluded the panellists, both about the topics that interest them the most and the ones that have wide-ranging implications for personal and societal health.