Examining engagement and responses to a digital binge drinking campaign for young males in Florida.

Objective: This study evaluates Drunken Rewind, an animated digital media campaign designed to reduce binge drinking. Participants: The campaign was targeted to white males aged 18-34, who are at the highest risk of binge drinking. Methods: The intervention consisted of an animated series that merged health communications approaches with marketing strategies to disseminate health messages. Digital metrics and comments were analyzed to assess receptivity toward the intervention. Results: The series amassed over 900,000 views and 1,762 followers across four social media platforms. Viewer retention rate was between 67%-73% over three seasons; 68.3% of comments on the videos were positive. Conclusions: This study adds evidence that a digital intervention aimed at reducing binge drinking can be feasibly implemented and positively received by a population that is difficult to reach with health messaging. This approach may be useful when applied to other health issues young adults perceive to have lower risk.

Content Themes and Influential Voices Within Vaccine Opposition on Twitter, 2019.

Objectives. To report on vaccine opposition and misinformation promoted on Twitter, highlighting Twitter accounts that drive conversation.Methods. We used supervised machine learning to code all Twitter posts. We first identified codes and themes manually by using a grounded theoretical approach and then applied them to the full data set algorithmically. We identified the top 50 authors month-over-month to determine influential sources of information related to vaccine opposition.Results. The data collection period was June 1 to December 1, 2019, resulting in 356 594 mentions of vaccine opposition. A total of 129 Twitter authors met the qualification of a top author in at least 1 month. Top authors were responsible for 59.5% of vaccine-opposition messages. We identified 10 conversation themes. Themes were similarly distributed across top authors and all other authors mentioning vaccine opposition. Top authors appeared to be highly coordinated in their promotion of misinformation within themes.Conclusions. Public health has struggled to respond to vaccine misinformation. Results indicate that sources of vaccine misinformation are not as heterogeneous or distributed as it may first appear given the volume of messages. There are identifiable upstream sources of misinformation, which may aid in countermessaging and public health surveillance.