The days of calling social media “new media” are long gone. Yet public health remains decades behind in learning how to use it effectively, content creators argued on Monday.

At the APHA 2025 session “The New ‘Social Science’: Meet Influencers and Content Creators Shaping the Conversation on Public Health,” the Burness Public Health Creator Fellows critiqued the field’s slow adoption of social media for advocacy and outlined how established content creators can help them catch up.

“Social media has been around for 20-plus years,” Nikki Sapiro Vinckier said. “We’ve watched the other side leverage social media so much more impactfully. … This isn’t new. We’re just really late to the game.”

Vinckier, an OB-GYN physician assistant and reproductive health advocate, is one of six content creators in the 2025 Burness Public Health Creator Fellows program, a collaboration with APHA. 

The other Fellows are Faith N. Adjei-Sarpong, an advocate for people with chronic illness; Elisabeth Marnik, a scientist turned public health communicator; Pari Chowdhary, a reproductive health advocate; Rahmatu Kassimu, a health equity advocate; and Tambra Raye Stevenson, a nutrition and health advocate.

The fellows represent a group that is landing public health on social media’s popular pages, something public health institutions and organizations have been slow to do, the fellows said. 

With over half of U.S. adults getting news from social media, the response of public health has undermined its objectives. Meanwhile, accounts with anti-public health initiatives — such as those promoting vaccine mis- and disinformation — have been on the frontlines of the adoption of social media. 

“Public health organizations are failing to meet the moment in terms of speaking to the public,” Chowdhary said. “We have entire new generations of individuals coming up within our society who have not a single clue about what the CDC even stands for.”

In the digital age, the general public wants important information in bit-sized pieces, not pages of study documents, Kassimu said. Public health needs to meet the moment by turning to social media — especially to experienced content creators — for effective outreach.

“You have to be able to figure out how to take a big topic and break it into bite size pieces... into the breakdown in 60 to 90 seconds about why it matters to you,” Kassimu said. 

For Marnick, growing up in up in an “anti-science, anti-vaccine household” led her to understand how long it can take to reach people. She didn’t get her first vaccine until she was 23. 

“It wasn’t the data that changed my mind,” Marnick said. “It was the stories that I learned from people who sat with me in classrooms and the professors who talked with me and helped me start to see things in a different way.” 

She uses Instagram and other social media platforms to communicate science through storytelling, empathy and nuance. 

Content creators are uniquely positioned to serve as a bridge between public health professionals and the community. While the public health workforce is well-prepared to address challenges to population health, content creators and social media experts can act as the link that translates this information for the public.

“This is an actual marketing plan you could deliver in terms of views and impact,” Chowdhary said. “The same thing that an organization would do in one year’s worth of marketing — you could do it overnight if you worked with the right creator in the right way.” 

Photo by Mikhail Nilov, courtesy Pexels.