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The Landscape of Health Misinformation

Public HealthApplied Policy

A policy toolkit developed in partnership with the Rhode Island Public Health Association (RIPHA) as part of Brown's Watson School Master of Public Affairs program, with Sarah Carpenter, MD. The project applies a public-health prevention framework- tertiary, secondary, primary, and primordial- to the spread of health misinformation, tracing the problem from historical outbreaks like Ebola and Zika through the COVID-19 infodemic to the emerging risk of AI-generated health disinformation.

The work includes two Rhode Island-specific case studies (disinformation around the Reproductive Health Act and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy), a review of current state legislation on AI use in healthcare, and concrete advocacy recommendations, including support for a Rhode Island media literacy curriculum mandate and legislative oversight of AI in insurance claims processing.

My contributions: researched Rhode Island's specific health misinformation landscape during the project's early scoping phase; authored the primordial prevention section, focusing on building institutional trust through policy opposing AI influence on health decision-making, and researched state legislation on AI use in healthcare across multiple states; co-authored the printed one-pager for the RIPHA symposium.

Prevention, layer by layer

The deepest layer, trust, is where the project argues AI policy belongs

  1. Primordial

    Build and maintain trust in health institutions

    AI policy that protects patients, e.g. Rhode Island's AI Transparency Act (S2010/H7190)

  2. Primary

    Build health and digital literacy

    Psychological inoculation · lateral reading · nudges

  3. Secondary

    Identify harmful narratives and intervene early

    Pre-bunking · social listening (WHO's EARS) · filling information voids

  4. Tertiary

    Provide effective resources to combat false narratives

    Debunking · community engagement to spread the truth

24.8%

of sampled COVID-19 tweets contained misinformation (Pasquetto, 2021)

102 in 65 min

vaccine and vaping disinformation blogs written by an LLM (Menz et al., 2024)

Four levels adapted from the World Health Organization (2025), ranging from preventing risk-factor development (primordial) to responding during an active infodemic (tertiary). Tools as assigned in the presentation.

Research Poster

Download Poster (PDF)