Do you want to avoid the hassle of traveling with your printed poster? IAPHS2026 is pleased to make poster printing available to you through our supplier PosterSessionOnline. Your poster will be professionally reviewed, printed and shipped directly to Portland and you will be able to pick it up from the Poster desk. Click here to learn more.
Primary Submission Category: Public Health Communication and Trust
Digital social influencer messaging reduces infection burden and modifies epidemic lag in group-structured populations
Authors: Aja Sutton, Adam Z. Reynolds, Matthew A. Turner, James Holland Jones,
Presenting Author: Aja Sutton*
Epidemics are systems of coupled contagion: the interaction between the social contagion of behavior and disease transmission. With increasing digital connectivity, the mode and contexts of social contagion and learning is changing. Now, many people can instantaneously interact with socially homogeneous networks that can include digital (social media) influencers. Many of these influencers have developed significant followings, with some espousing, e.g., “anti-vax/mask” sentiment. Yet, formal models have yet to test the intuitive hypothesis that messaging from these influencers is sufficient to generate tangible, real-world effects on population-level epidemic outcomes. For the first time, we develop an agent-based model of coupled contagion that incorporates digital influencers into an epidemic scenario to test hypotheses about how competing influence messages can affect the diffusion of health-protective behaviors throughout a population, and thereby alter the course and outcome of infectious disease epidemics.
In coupled contagion systems where behavior and disease both diffuse endogenously throughout the population, influencers play a unique role — especially for novel epidemics when people are behaviorally naïve. At the macro-level, a population’s behavior can be affected by policy and public health messaging. At the micro-level, individual social learning depends on local and personal connections in social networks. Influencers, however, exist in a meso-level position: though they are highly unlikely to influence the entire population, they gain greater-than-average influence in the population by growing a social following (e.g., via sociopolitical identity), and thus have influence not only through their direct messaging, but also by shaping opinion and group identity in ways that structure the environment for social learning. We test epidemic scenarios of coupled contagion across two social conditions known to shape epidemics: homophily and out-group aversion. We find influencers can affect both individual behaviors and contribute to persistent behavioral differences between groups. These trends were strongest when social polarization was high. Health-protective messaging was able to protect the total population even in the presence of anti-protective influence.