On 7 March, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sent a tweet alerting its 5.4 million followers about a measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico. The update also encouraged clinicians to be vigilant about symptoms of the disease and urged updated vaccinations for anyone traveling to those areas. Many tweets in response to CDC were in support of the advice, but some argued vaccination was unnecessary. Others went so far as to call the organization criminal.
Criticism of public health institutions is increasingly common, and a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explored their effects in detail. They surveyed 6800 people in the United States and showed that certain critical social media posts not only led to declining trust, but also incited feelings of anger—and increased readers’ tendency to engage with those posts.
“Trust is a difficult term to define, never mind study,” says Jevin West, co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington, who was not involved with the study. The new work, he says, “has provided a whole set of new questions about what else we should be testing.”
