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• Will history repeat itself? Studying Canada's evolving COVID-19 communications

Will history repeat itself? Studying Canada's evolving COVID-19 communications

News clippings from the 1919 Spanish Flu (Collage images sourced from: Pessimist Archives)

March 2020 feels like a lifetime ago.

As social media enabled our isolated experiences to converge online, the COVID “infodemic” began. Six months later, as we move into various stages of re-opening, Canadians are still actively engaging online, searching for answers and adding their questions, concerns, and experiences to a global digital dialogue.

Our team at Western University’s Lab for Knowledge Translation has been wading through a sea of information over social media. Our CIHR-funded research team is asking: What does good public health communication look like in 2020? Are we using social media as effectively as we can?

Our digital world has expanded over the last decade as social media platforms acquired billions of active users. These apps have evolved from recreational use into important tools that help us get information, connect with each other and make sense of the future. Google Trends analyses confirm that COVID-19-related searches worldwide have become the most popularly searched terms, far exceeding searches about other news, weather, or politics.

At the same time, poor health media literacy and misinformation have run rampant across our digital spaces. Communications professionals in public health are understandably struggling to keep up with evolving consumer behaviour trends. How do we break through the noise of everything from Trump to TikTok?  

Our research team is using data science methods to explore how public health officials are using social media and the impact of their messages on citizens. Here are some early trends we are seeing so far in our work:

• Territories and  provinces have various levels of engagement on social media. We’ve seen some interesting trends over different time periods and will continue to follow how public engagement connects to other factors and policies.
• As we are building national timelines for the pandemic by jurisdiction, we’re seeing some provinces/territories streamline policy actions and announcements into single days, and others presenting staggered policy responses and announcements over longer periods. It will be interesting to discuss the political, economic, and public health impacts of these approaches and map them against other health indicators.
• While governments across Canada have leveraged their social media accounts and some even created COVID-19 specific webpages to share information, public health officials (Medical Officers of Health) have a more limited presence on social media. 

We know this is only one piece of this puzzle.

Our team wants to help public health leaders, researchers, and policymakers explore this emerging space together. We also want to bring the public into this conversation. We can’t do it alone.

We are actively searching for industry and policy partners to collaborate on building an open-access toolkit that supports public health and health systems professionals to engage, educate, and empower citizens with accurate information. 

If you’d like to learn more and collaborate with us, connect with Gina Uppal, who is leading our partnerships work at buppal3@uwo.ca