by Brenda Baletti, Ph.D., Childrens Health Defense:
University of Pennsylvania researchers said the tool can be adapted to “swiftly and efficiently” address “misinformation” regarding COVID-19, childhood vaccinations and cancer treatment.
University of Pennsylvania researchers — using U.S. taxpayer dollars — are developing an artificial intelligence (AI) tool designed to “inoculate” social media users against “misinformation” about the HPV vaccine posted on social media, grant documents obtained by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealed.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is funding the $4 million “Inoculate for HPV Vaccine” randomized controlled trial running from April 2022 through March 2027. The National Cancer Institute, part of HHS, is facilitating the funding. Funding for year three was released in April.
The study is headed up by Melanie L. Kornides, associate professor of nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, whose research focuses on increasing vaccine uptake, and also on “strategies to combat misinformation.”
Kornides is joined by a team of digital health communication experts, software and program designers, social media analysts and machine learning systems experts who will help her run the “inoculation” experiment on 2,500 parents of children ages 8-12.
The team is collecting user data from YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram where people talk about HPV and using natural language processing to train an AI tool to identify “HPV misinformation,” or posts that are critical of vaccination — whether or not the information in the post is true or false.
They will then develop and test their “inoculation tool,” exposing subjects in three study arms to different types of messaging meant to make them immune to such misinformation.
A control group will get no particular messaging and two test groups will be exposed either to messaging designed to inoculate viewers against content critical of of HPV vaccines and content critical of anti-vaccine arguments.
The subjects will get “booster” doses of messaging at three and six months after their first inoculation.
If successful, the researchers wrote, this novel approach to combating health “misinformation” can be used in “wide-scale social media campaigns” addressing pandemics, childhood vaccination and other health issues.
Misinformation about the HPV vaccine, they wrote, is a major cause of “vaccine hesitancy” that circulates widely among well-meaning people, but often comes from “anti-vaccine organizations.”
Mary Holland, co-author of “The HPV Vaccine on Trial: Seeking Justice for a Generation Betrayed” told The Defender that the University of Pennsylvania research on the part of the public health industry is “a sign of weakness.”
“When you are censoring information, labeling it misinformation and smearing us, this is a sign that they’ve lost the science and are now in a verbal food fight. It’s just a sign they are going to lose,” she said.
The funding for the grant is part of a broader project within HHS to increase HPV vaccine uptake by funding research to develop messaging for providers and trusted community leaders that will convince more parents to vaccinate children against HPV.
It is one of more than 50 grants totaling more than $40 million awarded by the HHS to universities, healthcare systems and departments of public health to increase HPV vaccine uptake that CHD identified were awarded through last year.
Since then, the number of such studies has grown, with 26 new grants totaling nearly $28 million awarded in 2024 alone.
It also aligns with a new initiative by the Biden administration to fund research on AI tools to identify and censor “misinformation,” “disinformation” and “malinformation” online, according to a U.S. House of Representatives interim report released in February. Those projects are funded through the National Science Foundation.
Read More @ ChildrensHealthDefense.org
