Reflection on social media: addressing misinformation and nursing responsibility

Discussion board post for NURS608 Philosophical and Critical Foundations in Nursing, post on May 24, 2022. Post is in response to peers discussing social media and nursing responsibilities.

I appreciate the points you two have made in your discussion around the challenge of providing accurate and correct information to patients while social media is providing conspiracy theories and unfounded facts. I think the advent and development of social media had many unforeseeable consequences in our society, one of which is that inherent to its very nature is the ability to give voice to literally any person or any concept. Social media allows anyone to create a space for any issue, and thus to form community around any issue, and once these people are able to meet each other and start having discussions, they quickly are able to validate their own thoughts or experiences, whether or not those are factual, founded on evidence, or even true. I think this is built in to social media's essence, and I do not think it is escapable no matter how much censorship an app may try to install, because users will simply move to a different app/medium where their community finds space. For example, Telegram is an app that is well known among conspiracy theorists and they are able to gather there to discuss healthcare topics without any restrictions. Reddit is another community-building app that is largely unrestricted as well.

We, as nurses, have a duty, in my opinion, to combat misinformation as much as we can, through our own social media platforms. During COVID's prime and peak, my Instagram stories were so focused on correcting COVID myths, encouraging my followers to adhere to public health guidelines, and addressing vaccine hesitancy, that my coworkers and friends would actually message me or approach me to ask for advice and clarifications. I became a sort of COVID/public health guru among my social circles in that time. It was also interesting to see, though, that some of my friends were actually posting conspiracy theories instead, and I would engage in debates with them on social media to attempt to educate them as well, some with more success than others. But it was emotionally laborious work, and actually quite exhausting, which I think is a large reason that more nurses do not leverage their social medias for similar purposes, and instead choose an avoidant approach when it comes to health misinformation. At times it even felt futile, especially as people would show up in the ED requesting horse-tranquilizers to cure their COVID (among other misinformed treatments), and refused to believe you when you tried to educate them. Social media is the double-edged sword that provides space for debate, presentation of various opinions, and community building, but because it is so unregulated by nature, it places the onus on the user to self-regulate, validate and verify what they are experiencing. Perhaps this is too much to expect of the average population.