COM’s Hong awarded first BU center grant on infectious diseases

The link between the spread of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on social media and hesitancy to get inoculated has been explored here in the United States, a place where social media is heavily used. Less is known about such a link in middle-income countries, however, where the use of social media is still growing.

That’s what Boston University College of Communication Media Science professor Traci Hong seeks to understand, aided by one of the first grants made by BU’s new Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases (CEID) Policy & Research.

Hong and two other Boston University professors, Derry Wijaya of the Department of Computer Science in the College of Arts and Sciences and Veronika Wirtz of the Department of Global Health within the School of Public Health, received $25,000 in research funding from CEID, established in June 2021 with the aim of increasing pandemic preparedness. 

The researchers will measure content on Twitter related to COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and posts containing vaccine misinformation from key political and religious figures in Brazil, Indonesia, and Nigeria. They plan to start collecting data from the year 2018 to get a baseline sentiment toward vaccines in general.

“These countries are very similar in a lot of ways in their profile, but they’re in very different parts of the world,” Hong said. “What we find so fascinating about these middle-income countries is that social media growth is still climbing. It’s going to increase in the foreseeable future, whereas developed countries are essentially saturated in terms of social media use.”

Another similarity among them, according to Hong, is that there is a strong religious presence, even though the denominations are different. Indonesia has the highest Muslim population in the world, according to World Population Review. Brazil is a predominantly Catholic and Protestant country, while the population in Nigeria is mainly split between Muslims and Christians, Hong said. 

“Religious leaders have a big role in terms of the information that’s being disseminated, but there’s still a lot of elected leaders so it’s an interesting dichotomy in terms of how these sources of information are going to play out,” Hong said.

The CEID has identified four “pillars” that encompass its research goals: governance, resilience, innovation, and trust. Hong’s initiative falls under the “trust” category, which the center defines as the ideal relationship among scientists, governments, public health organizations and populations affected by an infectious disease. Projects in this category focus on reducing misinformation, specifically on social media platforms.

Hong said the research will take about a year and will culminate in at least two papers, but that the goal is to build a machine learning algorithm to detect misinformation with political and religious motivations in the three countries studied. She said at least two COM graduate students, Kassidy House in Media Science and Yanbo Li in Emerging Media Studies (EMS) will assist in the research. Jiaxi Wu, a Ph.D student in EMS is also helping with the project.

“It is a mistake to use the 1918 pandemic as the basis for this pandemic. Pandemics are not necessarily 100 year events, Hong said. “The people who are alive now may go through another pandemic, but whether it’s in our lifetime or the lifetime of the next generation, we owe a service to the world to take what we know, so when the next pandemic comes, we’ll be better prepared.”