We need a gold standard for randomised control trials studying misinformation and vaccine hesitancy on social media

Vaccine hesitancy and the spread of misinformation on social media have been recognised by the World Health Organization as an urgent threat to public health, with potentially lethal consequences.12 During the covid-19 pandemic, US president Joe Biden concluded that misinformation on social media was “killing people.”3 Research about the negative impacts of health misinformation online is increasingly being published, but how can we effectively counter vaccine misinformation on social media? Correlational, exploratory, and descriptive4 studies are overabundant, but we lack a broader framework for using this research base to inform our efforts. We know a lot already from computational approaches about the unique topics and narratives spread within anti-vaccination echo chambers5 and have documented the types of health misinformation that are prevalent on different social media platforms.67 However, systematic reviews show that real world interventions on social media are few and far between.4 Notably, the field also lacks a gold…
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