WHO's Community-Centered Epidemic and Pandemic Information Platform: Hive.

Each epidemic and pandemic is accompanied by an infodemic. The infodemic during the COVID-19 pandemic was unprecedented. Accessing accurate information was difficult and misinformation harmed the pandemic response, the health of individuals and trust in science, governments and societies. WHO is building a community-centered information platform, the Hive, to deliver on the vision of ensuring that all people everywhere have access to the right information, at the right time, in the right format in order to make decisions to protect their health and the health of others. The platform provides access to credible information, a safe space for knowledge-sharing, discussion, and collaborating with others, and a forum to crowdsource solutions to problems. The platform is equipped with many collaboration features, including instant chats, event management, and data analytics tools to generate insights. The Hive platform is an innovative minimum viable product (MVP) that seeks to leverage the complex information ecosystem and the invaluable role communities play to share and access trustworthy health information during epidemics and pandemics.

Narrative Trends over the COVID-19 Pandemic: Digital Social Listening to Inform WHO Infodemic Management.

The COVID-19 infodemic is an overwhelming amount of information that has challenged pandemic communication and epidemic response. WHO has produced weekly infodemic insights reports to identify questions, concerns, information voids expressed and experienced by people online. Publicly available data was collected and categorized to a public health taxonomy to enable thematic analysis. Analysis showed three key periods of narrative volume peaks. Understanding how conversations change over time can help inform future infodemic preparedness and prevention planning.

The Good Talk! A Serious Game to Boost People's Competence to Have Open Conversations About COVID-19: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial.

BACKGROUND: Vaccine hesitancy is one of the many factors impeding efforts to control the COVID-19 pandemic. Exacerbated by the COVID-19 infodemic, misinformation has undermined public trust in vaccination, led to greater polarization, and resulted in a high social cost where close social relationships have experienced conflict or disagreements about the public health response. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this paper is to describe the theory behind the development of a digital behavioral science intervention-The Good Talk!-designed to target vaccine-hesitant individuals through their close contacts (eg, family, friends, and colleagues) and to describe the methodology of a research study to evaluate its efficacy. METHODS: The Good Talk! uses an educational serious game approach to boost the skills and competences of vaccine advocates to have open conversations about COVID-19 with their close contacts who are vaccine hesitant. The game teaches vaccine advocates evidence-based open conversation skills to help them speak with individuals who have opposing points of view or who may ascribe to nonscientifically supported beliefs while retaining trust, identifying common ground, and fostering acceptance and respect of divergent views. The game is currently under development and will be available on the web, free to access for participants worldwide, and accompanied by a promotional campaign to recruit participants through social media channels. This protocol describes the methodology for a randomized controlled trial that will compare participants who play The Good Talk! game with a control group that plays the widely known noneducational game Tetris. The study will evaluate a participant's open conversation skills, self-efficacy, and behavioral intentions to have an open conversation with a vaccine-hesitant individual both before and after game play. RESULTS: Recruitment will commence in early 2023 and will cease once 450 participants complete the study (225 per group). The primary outcome is improvement in open conversation skills. Secondary outcomes are self-efficacy and behavioral intentions to have an open conversation with a vaccine-hesitant individual. Exploratory analyses will examine the effect of the game on implementation intentions as well as potential covariates or subgroup differences based on sociodemographic information or previous experiences with COVID-19 vaccination conversations. CONCLUSIONS: The outcome of the project is to promote more open conversations regarding COVID-19 vaccination. We hope that our approach will encourage more governments and public health experts to engage in their mission to reach their citizens directly with digital health solutions and to consider such interventions as an important tool in infodemic management. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): PRR1-10.2196/40753.