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. 2023 Jan 31;120(5):e2208110120.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.2208110120. Epub 2023 Jan 26.

Digital public health interventions at scale: The impact of social media advertising on beliefs and outcomes related to COVID vaccines

Susan Athey  1 , Kristen Grabarz  2 , Michael Luca  2 , Nils Wernerfelt  3
Affiliations

Digital public health interventions at scale: The impact of social media advertising on beliefs and outcomes related to COVID vaccines

Susan Athey et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .

Abstract

Public health organizations increasingly use social media advertising campaigns in pursuit of public health goals. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of about $40 million of social media advertisements that were run and experimentally tested on Facebook and Instagram, aimed at increasing COVID-19 vaccination rates in the first year of the vaccine roll-out. The 819 randomized experiments in our sample were run by 174 different public health organizations and collectively reached 2.1 billion individuals in 15 languages. We find that these campaigns are, on average, effective at influencing self-reported beliefs-shifting opinions close to 1% at baseline with a cost per influenced person of about $3.41. Combining this result with an estimate of the relationship between survey outcomes and vaccination rates derived from observational data yields an estimated cost per additional vaccination of about $5.68. There is further evidence that campaigns are especially effective at influencing users' knowledge of how to get vaccines. Our results represent, to the best of our knowledge, the largest set of online public health interventions analyzed to date.

Keywords: COVID-19 vaccine; meta-analysis; public health advertising; randomized experiment.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have organizational affiliations to disclose, K.G. is a part-time contractor through PRO Unlimited, a contracting agency used by Meta Platforms. N.W. is an employee of Meta Platforms. Yes, the authors have stock ownership to disclose, N.W. owns stock in Meta Platforms. Yes, the authors have research support to disclose, S.A. received funding from Meta Platforms for research projects related to public health. Yes, the authors have additional information to disclose, S.A. previously provided consulting services for Meta Platforms.

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