Atti del 52° Congresso Nazionale: Società Italiana di Igiene, Medicina Preventiva e Sanità Pubblica (SItI)

In Italy a research conducted on number of followers of public Facebook ® pages of pro-and anti-vaccine organizations showed, in April 2015, a clear predominance of anti-vaccines pages (over 25,000 followers of pages of anti-vaccines health professionals or pages that stated the associations between autism and vaccination vs over 10,000 to pro-vaccines pages). After 3 years, in April 2018, trough a widespread network of health organizations (vaccinarsi.org website, Iovaccino, Rete Informazioni Vaccini), over 120,000 followers of pro-vaccines pages have significantly overcomed 65,000 followers of anti-vaccines pages (Dr. Daniel Fiacchini personal data; presented at 51 st National Congress of the Italian Society of Hygiene, Preventive Medicine and Public Health). In 2016, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) released the technical document "Social media strategy development" that represents a guide for public health organisations to integrate social media into their overall communication activities 6 . The report underline the role of Social media for listening, informing, educating, and empowering people about health issues. During the last years Social media play a key role also in collecting surveillance data, enhancing the speed at which communication is sent and received during public health emergencies or outbreaks and facilitating desired behaviour changes 6 . The guide provides a flexibile approach due to different social media literacy and capacities within EU Member States and includes examples, drawn from European public health agencies or organizations, to illustrate practical approaches to Social Media (for instance on sharing information, retweeting public health messages, analyzing Google ® trends ecc.). Finally, the guide reports practical advice on using the most popular social media platforms, including Twitter ® , Facebook ® and YouTube ® 6 . According to ECDC, Social Media are an essential tool for public health organizations, allowing to collect feedback from general population in real-time, to drive online conversations on relevant topics of interest, to have a direct contact with users and to provide a channel to rapidly respond to queries and concerns 6 . Finally, the public health professionals that approach a "social media" communicative strategy should consider that: