Even casual observers understand that the COVID-19 pandemic unleashed a new level of vitriol and distrust towards public health messages and messengers. The World Health Organization popularized the term “infodemic” to describe the cacophony of false or misleading information that spread on social media, social messaging apps, and in everyday conversations. Numerous research and health organizations have dedicated resources to attempt to discover and measure the impact of this misinformation. Fact-checkers and communications teams similarly turned their attention to debunking and countering dangerous rumors. Unfortunately, the infodemic problem has not abated and its impact has hardened an alarming distrust of best practices in public health.
The Africa Infodemic Response Alliance (AIRA) has a mission to rapidly share safe, proven facts on health and counter health misinformation where it spreads. Even as some of the fervor around COVID-19 has waned, AIRA has observed distrust spread to other outbreaks (e.g., mpox) and vaccines for other diseases (e.g., polio, malaria). That’s why AIRA has partnered with RootWise to build the Africa Misinformation Portal (AMP).
AMP is a web-based portal but it is not another dashboard simply tracking health rumors that show up online. It is an easy-to-use operational tool to aggregate real public health rumors and misinformation from the field and make localized infodemic response possible via Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI identifies best-available debunking content for the specific contextual issues discovered. It empowers local users to act: the people who understand the nuance and reality of their own communication environments best.
In other words, AMP bridges multiple existing roles and workflows to make everyone’s work easier and more effective while ensuring that marginalized voices deep in the field can influence decision-making. Large public health organizations and governments are putting resources towards countering misinformation but the lens they have of the real rumor landscape is limited. Field teams, including risk communications and community engagement and medical professionals, have strong working knowledge of rumors in their communities but limited resources to direct rapid responses. AMP unblocks these bottlenecks and provides direct signals to fact checkers and innovative response teams like Viral Facts Africa on what content is needed now. Then, AMP’s AI recommendation engine provides a decentralized, on-demand system for inserting these resources into hyperlocal conversation spaces at the judgment of local experts.
RootWise is pleased to announce that we have architected and built the tech necessary to produce this new method of scalable, localized infodemic management. Our AI stack includes BERT models hosted on HuggingFace and GPT-4 (ChatGPT) models provided by OpenAI. We used a modern framework in a mobile-friendly serverless web application. It uses a mix of open source, commercial, and proprietary software like React, Opensearch, and Amazon Web Services for scalable security and stability. Most importantly, RootWise maintains a relentless focus on usability and overcoming typical barriers to integrating new tech within the workstreams of busy professionals. The result is a sophisticated service delivered via an intuitive low/no-training interface that encourages users to jump in and unlock new capabilities for countering dangerous misinformation on day one.
We are looking forward to the next phase of development for AMP including a wide rollout among the partners and organizations served by AIRA and continued user feedback and technical development leading to an effortless and empowering user experience.
