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.
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.
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