WHO Toolkit: Analysing online interactions and trends on youth-favoured platforms

I have been contracted by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to create a toolkit for analysing online interactions and trends on youth-favoured platforms

The toolkit is intended to facilitate better understandings of sentiments relating to COVID-19 vaccines and/or the pandemic, particularly those expressed by young people online over youth-favoured social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitch.

The toolkit’s conceptual framework, training plan and teaching instruments can strengthen infodemic management (IM) by training young people and those who work with them to identify, analyse, and explain the significance of youth communications online. It is structured to benefit everyone active in IM, particularly young people, and those with roles that influence the lives of young people.

The training plan for this toolkit centres on six steps, as follows:

Step 1. Detecting, collecting and categorising youth sentiment online.
Step 2: Message analysis: contents, formats, effects.
Step 3: Messenger analysis: identities, intents and contexts
Step 4: Audience analysis: receptions and reactions
Step 5: Thematic synthesis: conditions, needs, critiques, desires
Step 6: Recommendations development: aids, challenges, considerations


The teaching instruments in this toolkit follow the steps above, stacking tasks and raising questions meant to impart the skills necessary to successfully locate, read, decode, and contextualise youth-generated sentiment (frequently expressed in photo, music, and/or video formats) with the objective of translating needs and desires of young people into language that can reach wider public audiences.