Robin Vincent-Smith of MSF (Doctors Without Borders) on fighting misinformation on social media: Let the patients speak.
It’s definitely got worse. Social media is an intensifier of disinformation, misinformation, so I’d say that’s how it’s got worse. And I think there’s been a breakdown in trust in general in all kinds of different areas, but also towards doctors. I mean, the position of your average doctor in society, there’s less trust, put it that way, but not only in doctors, also in teachers in other professions as well. And so we’ve got a whole project, we call it the Dismiss Projects; Disinformation Misinformation project. And yes, we’ve got communications departments and teams to work and counter and put out the message as we have for years, but I think what it really comes back to is we want to maintain our integrity about the information that we communicate.
There’s two ways of doing that. The first is to let the patient speak for themselves and give them a platform to speak, and so it comes directly from the source as opposed to speaking on their behalf or having spokespersons on their behalf. And so we try to do that. The default situation is that. When you look at the MSF websites, what I hope you’ll see is patients speaking out about what they’re experiencing rather than MSF staff interpreting what they think the patients are thinking.
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