Misinformation

VIRGINIA DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH (VDH)

At the height of the pandemic, VDH, like all public health agencies across the country, was working to assess how misinformation was endangering citizens’ health, particularly among hard-to-reach citizens and those at greater risk of death from COVID infection.

AlphaVu deployed its patent-pending Misinformation Risk Identification (MRI) algorithms, which can be tuned to identify critical levels of online misinformation about any topic, to identify dangerous misinformation in unique geographies and within specific at-risk demographic groups so factual public information could be more effectively targeted, distributed, and supported. Subsequent academic research is now supporting the efficacy of these methods, showing factual information can and does counteract the effects of misinformation.