The Quello team recently contributed to a National Institute of Health grant proposal aimed at establishing effective information technology (IT) strategies to prevent medical misinformation from spreading via digital communications and to enable members of underserved populations to make informed healthcare decisions. This study develops a detection system using an artificial intelligence technique to identify visual antivax messages on social media sites used primarily for image sharing, and identifies key persuasion tactics used to increase vaccine hesitancy among at-risk populations. In addition, Laleah Fernandez is co-authoring a review paper for submission to the journal Vaccine, which highlights the recent steps taken to curtail the spread of health- related misinformation by Amazon, Pinterest, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. This paper describes changing policies over the past five years and the consequences of various actions such as filtering sources of misinformation in searches, identifying and removing content from their platform, tweaking recommendations and banning paid ads from anti-vaccination activists and foreign agencies.
