Fight Health Fake News by Influencing Influencers: Lisa Jarvis

Public health institutions are facing the challenge of a lifetime as social media breeds misinformation and disinformation about everything from Covid vaccines to climate change. Now, a creative program at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health is trying to flip the script by influencing the influencers on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Given the monumental task, we need more experiments like this.

In a pilot program last year, Harvard researchers provided dozens of mental health influencers with simple toolkits (and in some cases, training from public health experts) providing accurate, evidence-backed information on specific mental health topics. The goal: ...