Doctors and Nurses Social Media Ads Reduced Holiday Travel and COVID-19 infections: A cluster randomized controlled trial in 13 States
Emily Breza, Fatima Cody Stanford, Marcela Alsan, M.D. Ph.D., Burak, Alsan, Abhijit Banerjee, Arun G. Chandrasekhar, Sarah Eichmeyer, Traci, Glushko, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Kelly Holland, Emily Hoppe, Mohit Karnani,, Sarah Liegl, Tristan Loisel, Lucy Ogbu-Nwobodo

TL;DR
This study demonstrates that social media campaigns featuring health professionals' messages effectively reduced holiday travel and COVID-19 infections in a large-scale randomized trial across 13 US states.
Contribution
It provides evidence that targeted social media ads by clinicians can significantly influence public health behaviors during a pandemic.
Findings
Holiday travel decreased by nearly 1 percentage point in high-intensity counties.
COVID-19 infections declined by 3.5% in treated zip codes.
Large-scale Facebook ad campaign reached over 35 million users.
Abstract
During the COVID-19 epidemic, many health professionals started using mass communication on social media to relay critical information and persuade individuals to adopt preventative health behaviors. Our group of clinicians and nurses developed and recorded short video messages to encourage viewers to stay home for the Thanksgiving and Christmas Holidays. We then conducted a two-stage clustered randomized controlled trial in 820 counties (covering 13 States) in the United States of a large-scale Facebook ad campaign disseminating these messages. In the first level of randomization, we randomly divided the counties into two groups: high intensity and low intensity. In the second level, we randomly assigned zip codes to either treatment or control such that 75% of zip codes in high intensity counties received the treatment, while 25% of zip codes in low intensity counties received the…
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