What the pandemic taught Facebook about public health

The COVID-19 pandemic offered Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, the chance to collect data about global health messages across more than 100 countries. And its head of health partnerships told Devex on Wednesday that results differed noticeably across countries. Lu’chen Foster spoke to Amruta Byatnal, senior editor at Devex, as part of a special event to accompany the 75th World Health Assembly. Meta platforms have faced criticism, including from the U.S. president, for failing to do enough to counter misinformation around the pandemic. Facebook faced controversy after unbanning comments saying the virus was human-made. And a report published late last year said there were still major gaps in the platform’s fact-checking. But Foster said her company had invested significant effort into helping global health professionals, and had developed insights into what worked. She highlighted differences caused both by culture and health systems. She said that in the Philippines, for example, front-line health care workers were more trusted than elsewhere as messengers about what people should do. “But in some parts of the U.S. we found that faith leaders were important,” she said. “We developed insights reports across many different countries and then we would send them out to partners, share information on calls, share learnings with them, so that they could quickly pivot,” she said. A vaccine finder launched in the United States, which was highly successful at helping people choose where to go to access a vaccine, did not work as well in other countries because governments in those countries were more into giving directives on where the population should go to access health care. Foster also said that while Meta had worked on preventing access to false information on the pandemic, it had faced a far greater challenge in helping individuals access accurate information. “We knew accurate and reliable information was important so the first thing we did was set up a COVID information center,” she said. “We made that available on Facebook and Instagram, so that people could see on the platforms where they already were.” Meta made more than $100 million of ad credits available to public health partners to share messages. But she said doing this had involved a lot of learning for those partners. She said for example that social media users expected information to be customized for them, but the process of doing this on social media had been new for public health, and had involved a lot of learning from Meta’s partner organizations.