Midterm-Social Media Project Submission Folder

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Instructions

INSTRUCTIONS Scenario: You are working as a co-op student at the Region of Waterloo International Airport. The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Region of Waterloo International Airport, Mohammed Awad, has sent you an article about how Social Media and COVID. He has a meeting in 3 hours to discuss a COVID strategy for the Airport and is wondering about the impact of Social Media. He has asked many others to provide him with summaries of articles and some experts to provide him with advice. He wants you to identify the key points from the article he has given you and send him an email before his meeting. You need to add value to the information when providing it to the CEO, through organization, structure and design, so that he can review and understand the key points efficiently. He has indicated that he doesn't know very much about social media. 

Requirements: 1. Read the Social Media article provided amd identify the key points from the article. 2. Write an email to Mohammed Awad explaining the key points from the article. 

ARTICLE Social medias impact on vaccine hesitancy Visuals on social media like memes, videos, photos, posters and emojis are processed faster, accepted without being questioned, and remembered for a longer period than text posts. Especially since the visual often includes a personalized dramatization of vaccine injuries  like an individual having a life-threatening seizure after receiving a vaccine. Since social media has rapidly grown as a source of news, more and more people are obtaining health information from social media. As a result, visual messaging on social media has significant associations with peoples intentions to get vaccinated  not only against COVID-19, but also for other immunizations. Specifically, our latest study has shown that individuals engagement with anti-vaccine messages on social media has a negative impact on their intentions to get vaccinated, while their engagement with pro-vaccine messages has no significant association. Anti-vaccination groups use propaganda techniques known to be effective in political campaigns. They define the pressing issue as vaccine safety/injuries and inefficacy and blame pharmaceutical companies for cutting corners to rapidly produce vaccines. They also make moral judgements by suggesting a coalition between corrupted politicians and profit-driven health care industries and recommend rejecting vaccines as a remedy to this problem. Prior studies on health communication have shown the importance of emphasizing the benefits of taking a health behavior rather than portraying the harms of refusing to take the health behavior. Also, focusing on the immediate and personalized benefits have been found more effective than distant, societal benefits. The revised mask mandate by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is in alignment with these findings: Make clear the tangible, immediate and personal benefits of getting COVID-19 vaccines such as, You can finally take off your masks as long as you get vaccinated! Conversely, focusing on societal, long-term benefits, such as the creation of herd immunity, has been known to be ineffective for encouraging individuals to take health behaviors. A well-known example of this communication strategy is to encourage safe sex practices during the HIV epidemic. Instead of focusing on the severe consequences of not using those health practices, communication specialists emphasized the benefits of practicing safe sex  you can enjoy your life freely if you practice safe sex. In short, the rhetoric for encouraging immunizations on social media should emphasize immediate and personalized benefits of taking the vaccines, rather than long-term protective or societal benefits. The effectiveness will also magnify if these benefits can be visually framed in photos, videos, memes, and/or posters, for the augmented persuasiveness of visual stimuli than textual narratives. Discerning accurate information from misinformation is a challenge that individuals may not be able to completely resolve. Social media puts us in a bubble called, Echo chambers where we are surrounded by like-minded individuals who reinforce our own existing views rather than being challenged by different views. Studies have shown that debiasing individuals especially from anti-vaccine beliefs is an extremely challenging task because health beliefs are deeply ingrained in our cultural backgrounds, political/religious beliefs and lifestyle choices. Thus, it is recommended to prevent populations that are especially vulnerable and susceptible to health misinformation from being exposed to it in the first place. It is essential to suppress the propagation of vaccine misinformation via social media. These solutions can be embedded in tools like fact-checkers installed in our web browsers that warn readers if the information to be presented is likely to be false. Mothers make over 90% of health decisions for children on their own or jointly with their children and/or partners. In any case, even though the gender roles are changing in this society, mothers still remain the key decision-makers for health-related issues for children. We need to recognize the intensity of stress that mothers feel when they must make decisions that directly affect their childrens well-being. In such emotion-laden circumstances, individuals tendency to choose a status quo option  inaction, or refusing to take any action at all  increases disproportionally. So, they end up with the non-decision, lets wait and see, which is manifested in vaccine hesitancy. The intense stress that mothers experience when making vaccination decisions is a crucial factor that increases their tendency to delay or deny immunizations for their children. Messages addressing the personal benefits of vaccines should focus on addressing the concerns of mothers, such as emphasizing that they will keep your children safe. Anti-vaccine messages have diverse themes, all of which converge to vaccine safety/injuries and the conspiracy theory on the alliance between corrupted politicians/government and the profit-driven pharmaceutical industry. Many of these posts in fact provide statistics, test results and even seemingly tangible evidence to back their claims. These messages are so elaborated and appear to be trustworthy that even most educated individuals can easily fall prey. REFERENCE

Argyris, Y.A. (2021, June 15). Social media's impact on vaccine hesitancy. MSUToday, 1.