Thank you. So I have the con side. It probably won't surprise you, anyone asked to speak about social media is probably pro-social media in some way, but it's important to share the potential downsides and challenges of the use of this tool for advocacy. I do not have any financial conflicts of interest, but in the spirit of full disclosure, I manage or co-manage several professional Twitter now X accounts, including the pediatric section of SCCM, the Polizzi, and also one called Nutrinet, which is a pediatric ICU nutrition site. And I am finishing up my term as chair of the social media committee for SCCM. So we're going to talk about the potential negative personal and professional consequences of using social media as a platform for clinicians. And argue that we're actually not obligated to use our voices via social media to promote public health, but then also talk about if you're out there, or it got out there, which we'll talk about, sometimes it will, even if you didn't put it out there, how do you manage and mitigate that? So why would I want to use social media in the first place? Because many people have this approach to social media. It's scary, there's crazy people out there, and I'm not interested. And there's a number of different platforms on which you can be present. One of my favorite follows on X is Dr. Jack Maple, who's actually a primary care pediatrician who talks about how we can leverage doodles and graphics to engage patients and families. But he also talks about can we, in his case, primary care providers, leverage it, or are we going to be called out for trying too hard, trying too hard to be cool? If you are involved in social media, I use this courtesy of Dr. Chris Carroll, who's a PEDS intensivist, very actively involved in social media. And our presence out there can vary widely. You can start at level one, which is kind of being a lurker. You're just watching. You're not even liking anything. You're not reposting anything, but you're just watching to see what happens up there. And your level of engagement, if you so desire, can increase over time that you begin interacting because you like. You maybe repost something someone says, but you don't add to it. You don't put your own voice out there. And then you can move towards endorsing, supporting. And then level five is actively contributing your own unique content in addition to supporting that of others that are posting in your areas of interest. So we know social media is extremely effective for rapid dissemination of information and education. And really, the biggest home run on this was our early contributions to understanding what was happening early in the pandemic. And in this paper published in Critical Care Medicine by Sapna Kutagkar and Chris Carroll, two PEDS ICU intensivists, looked at the rapid fire dissemination of COVID-19 across the globe. And one of the things that happened for us was what we now know as MIS-C, and in adults MIS-A, our previous ways of disseminating information, such as publication or waiting to the next conference, were insufficient. And we first learned about MIS-C via Twitter from the UK and said, hey, are you on the other side of the pond seeing what we're seeing in these kids, this Kawasaki-like syndrome? And we were. And so we were able to start coalescing around this new entity via the power of social media. And so we said, we need more of you. But there are downsides. Are we actually obligated to be advocates at all, social media or otherwise? Well, from an SCCM perspective, as the nonprofit organization that we are, we cannot be lobbyists or legislative advocates. But we are very much advocates for health care. The actual language out of our bylaws says that no substantial part of the activities of this corporation shall consist of carrying on a propaganda, excuse me, or otherwise attempting to influence legislation. And the corporation shall not participate or intervene in a campaign on behalf of any candidate of public office. So on behalf of SCCM, we can't legislate or advocate for legislation. But we can advocate for health care. But should we? Because Martin Luther King, and it's a great week to talk about that, one of his stances was of all of the forms of inequality, injustice, and is injustice in health care as the most shocking and the most inhumane? Oops, what's that? There are those that say political advocacy in areas of public health and advocating for health equity is in fact a form of implementation science. And this is a great article that talks about that. If we know there are things that need to be changed to improve health care, we have some obligation to do that. And that is implementing the best science. But it might take advocacy for that to happen. So what could happen? Why is this even a con in this debate? So one of the things that happens out there is misinformation. And the definition of misinformation is incorrect or misleading information, which you can see in the pyramid. We have the top of this pyramid are things we're very familiar with in terms of levels of evidence, right? Medical practice guidelines, case control reports. Down near the bottom, animal and lab studies. But look at the bottom of this pyramid. Your high school acquaintances on Facebook. So if you're picking that up, or pick any social media platform, and using that as what you choose to share verbally on social media or elsewhere, you're picking it up on social media. And by sharing it and not validating it, you are spreading misinformation. Maybe not with malintent, but misinformation. Disinformation, on the other hand, is false information deliberately and often covertly spread, such as the planting of rumors, in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth. So this is intent and with malintent. And one of the ways that we know both misinformation and disinformation have harmed our communities is the vaccine disinformation campaigns. And in some cases, they are very much campaigns. So disinformation. Most recently heralded by outbreaks of measles in places like Philadelphia, Atlanta, and the UK. So and Dr. Pai here calls out, it's 2024, and we are seeing outbreaks of measles in the U.S. and UK. And he calls it out as disinformation, intentional, and not just misinformation. So is one of the ways that we can do this separating our personal and professional lives on social media? Our leaders should be helping us to be the best possible professional that we can. But maybe one of the ways to do that, one of the strategies some people use is they have a personal social media account or they're personal on this platform and they're professional on another platform. Some people will put in their bio a statement that say, my posts do not represent the positions of my employer or something along those lines. Is that enough? Does it even matter if you do that? So what I would say is you've really got to go back and look at what your institution or institutions, sometimes we have an academic appointment as well as a hospital appointment, what do they say about their employees and their use of social media, if anything? And questions that you want to try to find out the answers to include things like is your stance on that particular topic different than your organization's? Well then you're more likely to run into conflict, that's kind of obvious. Should you maybe disclose to them a priority, this is something that I advocate about, you're going to see me post that, I'm not going to include you, I'm not saying I'm an employee of this organization, I'm doing this as my own personal professional advocacy. What are their funding streams? Are they private? What are the influences of those organizations? Are they public? Are they government funded? And what does that mean for that organization and their ability to support or even hold neutral to what you may be trying to do in your advocacy work? And so how, if at all, should you be interacting with your organization's public relations and communications marketing teams? Because if you're tagging them in some way, then you might say you're not representing them but you're linking yourself to them. So I'm sharing stories with permission or out in the public eye on when it can become difficult. A critical care provider and leader involved in a hospital system was very involved in legislative advocacy with a professional organization. They were there on their own time. They were not at all there as a representative of their employer. Made clear there was no affiliation. Their department and hospital leadership were aware she was doing this and were initially very supportive. In 2023, she was asked to testify as an expert witness, if you will, to the state legislature over three controversial health care related bills that were coming to the state legislature. All of a sudden, she starts getting pushback from the board of her institution. You need to soften your stance just a little bit. And at one point, she was asked to write a letter to the board of director explaining that her stances were actually supported by major medical organizations so that she could justify what she was saying. The background, which she knew, was that the hospital received significant funding from the state budget. It was a public hospital. At this point in time, a very conservative supermajority is in control of the legislature and they did not like her stances towards public health advocacy that she was bringing forth. And despite the fact that she was doing it completely unaffiliated with her employer, that wasn't good enough. And ultimately, the hospital board completely flipped their stance on their support of not only her activities, but some of their stances on some of the health care they were delivering in these controversial areas and flipped and no longer supported the health care they were delivering as well as her advocacy and said she needed to change or at least submit anything she was going to present for their review and censorship before she went to the state legislature. She declined to do that. She resigned from all of her leadership positions, still does some occasional part-time clinical work, and her primary employment is now outside of academic medicine and is primarily with an institution that is working in safety and quality and advocacy and finds herself happier, but it was a very difficult time, as you might imagine. Another important point on the con side is in this day and age of social media is even if you are not on social media, not one single platform, what we do professionally or otherwise is not necessarily private anymore and it's certainly not considered sacred. And what you do can end up on social media, even if you're never out there yourself. In this next one that got a fair amount of press, an award-winning medical student research, it was like the top winner in a competition on transgender pediatric care, was taken out of context, conservative activists took one line from the study summary completely out of context, a parenthetical noting that the youngest transgender patient seen in this particular institution was four years old. Not that they were receiving therapy, simply that they were seen as part of the demographics of this report. They then turned around and inaccurately claimed that this four-year-old was being prescribed hormones and being physically transitioned as part of a gender transition, which was not true. And so it brought out social media at its worst. Elon Musk starts tweeting, X-ing, and Thomas Beach was a member of the state legislature at the time, and so it was clearly MUSC, if they're mutilating or castrating children, I won't stop until they're stripped of all public funding. None of this was happening, none of it was true, but for a while that didn't matter because that's what was out on social media. So lawmakers asked the hospital leaders whether or not this public hospital was, in fact, helping very young children transition. They were not. The legislator passed a specific budget proviso that made gender-affirming care illegal in anybody less than 16 years of age in this hospital only because it had public funding. The hospital board bowed to the pressure and decided to take it further, completely disallowing gender-affirming care for anyone under 18 years of age, basically took it out of their hospital system. As a result, multiple providers left and they never informed the families the care was being withdrawn until they tried to come to their next appointment. So lessons learned. Social media can attract attention, even your likes. I had actually a good example of this, honestly. Yesterday I posted a picture here from our meeting. A bunch of us took a picture over in the Select Lounge and I posted it talking about the fun of seeing colleagues here at SCCM, and a bunch of trolls and bots. Trolls are, if you're not familiar, real people, but who are out there really just to cause malicious harm and disruption on social media. And bots are literally, they're robots, automated accounts, set to look for certain language or terms, and then post-controversial statements. And we got blasted because we weren't wearing masks and we were going to take everything we had here back home and kill kids. So what I did was relatively simple. I went down the accounts that were involved and just blocked all of those people. So there are tools that we can use. And so it's just a reminder that whatever we do, it can end up on the front page of media or social media or other kinds of media. So look at funding sources for organizations that you are involved in to know what potential pressures and backstories exist. Assume that anything you post can be posted out of context, and be prepared to fight back. And fighting back is with facts, with responding and not reacting. And know that a lot of good advocacy can still be done within academic medicine, within and outsides of our conventional institutions. When others are telling you to be careful or be cautious, something's coming, don't poo-poo it. Stop and listen. Consider all of the sources. And a couple of other examples that people who have had a difficult experience but turned it to good. This is our lane some of you may or may not be familiar with, and Dr. Behrens is going to talk further about that on the plus side. But in advocating for gun control, because gun violence is the number one killer of kids in this country, the NRA pushed back in a social media post some time ago talked about stay in your own lane. This is not a healthcare lane. Well, we've promptly flipped that and said, in fact, this is our lane. And it became one of the most popular hashtags ever out there on social media. And she'll talk a little bit more about how that turned to a huge positive on the advocacy side. But just because somebody pushes back doesn't mean we can't take it and transform it. Some of you may or may not be familiar with the story of Dr. Annie Andrews, who's a pediatrician who practiced in South Carolina and ran for state legislator as a part of her advocacy plan. She was the, ended up being in that effort, got tremendous negative pushback, blatant lies told about her, her practice, her institution. And I put the link to one of her Twitter ex-posts here and posted the excerpts. And she didn't win that political race, but she since moved to another state and is again working in a place and a space where she can almost solely focus on healthcare advocacy for children. And it's never stopped her presence on social media. But you can see here, I've posted her response that she put out there, which was eloquent. And really talks about it is our job to advocate, even in the face of that adversity. And the pushback wasn't going to stop her. So I've already alluded to having a plan for pushback is including having, if you're going to go out there for anything potentially that you think could be potentially controversial, have a plan to push back. What are your talking points? Make sure that you have resources and references and evidence to back it up. Respond rather than react, but that doesn't mean respond to trolls and bots. That's probably not worth your time. Just block them. You can also, in almost all of the platforms that you're out there on, curate your account, meaning by the people that you follow, the posts that you like. Do you allow people to private message you? Do you hold that closed? Or only people whom you follow? There are ways that you can manage your account to help you keep at bay, to some degree, people who are going to potentially bring disinformation and adversity to the work you are doing in social media. Kindness in the face of that adversity and not engaging in an equally negative way is important because that will never do anything but go downhill. Never. Some general rules, no matter how or what reasons you're out there posting. This is Twitter, but it really applies to any social media platform. Never post unpublished data. Never post patient or family pictures without explicit permission. HIPAA rules apply, and that means even if you don't list one of the 17 identifiers, if you post enough of a story that someone can identify that person or that case, that is a violation of HIPAA. So you need to leave time, leave out enough details, change some of the details to make it not identifiable. Never give specific medical advice out there in legitimate conversations with a disagreement. Never sacrifice collegiality just to win out there. And don't forget to cite your sources. So you can help advocate for the patients and the families and the causes that are important to you inside your institutions or outside. It's hard to do both, especially if they have some potential conflicts. So you might have to choose your path. The good news is despite all the pushback and the disinformation out there, there are many people out there on various social media platforms still pushing for good healthcare, best practice based on best evidence, advocacy to change rules and laws that benefit our community's health. And it's never too late to start becoming part of that voice. It can be a quiet voice, it can be a loud voice, but you can be a part of the voices. The power in the social media community is not to be underestimated. There are people here at this meeting here today that I've met for the first time from other parts of the globe that I've literally known for years. I've done projects with, I've been in leadership positions with. We've published together. Those relationships can be real, warm, productive, and so it can be a great power for good. But you do have to be careful. Don't jump on a bandwagon without doing your homework. But you can see lots of folks here, how we use it and how the reach of SCCM and all of us is spread. There is a whole social media page for SCCM if you want to get involved as a social media ambassador, folks that are willing to talk to you about it, and I've shared a few references. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to, you're going to introduce Dr. Behrens. Thank you, Dr. Brown, for that presentation. Next, we have the pro side for clinicians should use social media platforms for public health advocacy. We have Deanna Behrens. Dr. Behrens is a physician with the Advocate Medical Group. Well, thank you all for coming today to listen to us talk about two things that I'm very passionate about, social media and advocacy. I'm so passionate about that that I recognize over half of the people in this room from social media and maybe more because there's people in the back and my eyes aren't what they used to be. And the other person who is here is my division director. I really appreciate her being here. She has very little interest in social media, but a lot of interest in supporting me with advocacy. So that is greatly appreciated. I have a terrible sense of timing. So if you see me looking down at my phone, I'm either looking to see what the response is or checking and making sure that I'm not going over time. Anyway, thank all of you again for coming. I have by far, in my opinion, the easier part of this debate. And in fact, Anne-Marie and I talked about this. We're both interested in advocacy. We're both interested in social media. But I do think that it is important and I'm so glad that she spent the last 20 minutes talking to you about how to do it in a way that is intentional and to know that there are some downsides to it as well. So that was really important. So I don't have any disclosures. Some of you may have seen me on various social media platforms. I am not on X quite as much anymore, but have been tweeting a lot about this conference, which is kind of reminding me of the old days, which was really fun. So I first do want to talk about why are intensivists advocates? I think a lot of us don't see ourselves in that role. A lot of us think, well, that's for the general pediatrician, that's for other people. But we need to advocate to try to keep people out of our intensive care unit as much as possible. In my opinion, that is our responsibility. But then social media, they asked me to talk about that as well, so I can't spend my whole talk on just advocacy. So talk about the different social media sites and when you might use which particular one. And then talk about, again, like Anne-Marie was saying, disseminating accurate information and combating disinformation. One thing that I want to say is why are we advocates? We're advocates because there's so much out there in this world that affect our patients. My main area of research and advocacy is gun violence, voting, immigrant child family health, and then also access to care. But your particular thing could be anything. And a lot of these things, when we get to the root cause of what is going on, for gun violence, for instance, a lot of the disparity and a lot of the burden of gun violence is caused by things that also lead to other admissions to the intensive care unit, like systemic racism, poverty, keeping people down. So those things that can lead to an epidemic of gun violence can also make certain groups more likely to end up in the ICU. As you heard from Dr. Jerome Adams yesterday with his own personal experiences as a black male child and what he was exhibiting with his symptoms for asthma and how the health care system was treating him or not treating him the way that he deserved to be treated. And that's why I do this because I think everybody should have the best access to the best outcomes, the best medical care, and that we should make sure that in our roles as trusted voices that we are providing that. I liked the slide that he put up yesterday that looked at equality and equity. But the slide that I actually like a tiny, tiny bit more, no disrespect to Dr. Adams, is justice. So it's not just that everybody gets the supports that they needed, but it's that we need to address the cause of inequity in the first place and remove the barriers to that. So again, I really like the equity, I'm very interested in that, but we need to push that even further if we are able. So why us? Why should we tell the story? What is special about us that makes people listen to us? Individual voices and group voices are incredibly important. We are credible, we are the experts, people want to hear from us. When I go to talk to a legislator as a physician, we will get a level of respect, usually, that we may or may not see if I went to see them in my role as a private citizen. And I have done both. I'm very careful to inform my institution of all of the stuff that we're doing. Maybe a little bit too much, as Dr. Quade knows, but I am very careful to inform our public relations and our government affairs. I know that my hospital's social media account follows me. I know that a couple of the legislator media account follows me. And so I'm careful about what I post and how I present myself on there, although I am my authentic self. And we can influence policy. I have put out tweets or op-eds or whatever and had legislators directly contact me about that. I've had CNN, NBC, other organizations contact me about that. So people are listening to what you are putting out there. So we can influence policy, and we can use the power of non-identifiable stories, unless we have the consent of the patient or parent. We can use that, combined with evidence, to make something that is real and personal and influence policy. And we did that in Illinois by enacting a—I keep wanting to say federal assault weapons ban, because that would be my ultimate goal, but a statewide assault weapons ban in Illinois, and also a bill about safer storage education, targeting different areas throughout the state, and an evaluative component for that. So they do listen to that. We were intimately involved in creating both of those bills. For different advocacy roles, though, right now, as the election year is coming up, and we're kind of gearing up towards that, I couldn't resist the opportunity to encourage everybody to make sure that they are voting. From a professional point of view, Anne-Marie touched on the difference between advocacy and lobbying. So not all of advocacy is lobbying. Advocacy can be talking about everybody wearing seatbelts without going further and saying, we have to make a law, or I'm going to make a law to tell everybody to wear seatbelts. So that would be the difference between advocacy and lobbying. So for instance, for gun violence, I personally think, and I have talked to people at SCCM about our role as a professional organization, maybe not to lobby, because that's not in their bylaws to do, but to speak out against that. And they did that by sending out that email to us, highlighting the stuff that they had done. And as a small note, as a power of social media and advocacy, I tweeted out yesterday that, while I think that this is a fantastic program that the people in charge of the Congress this year have put together, there's not one single advocacy, or there's not one single session on gun violence, and that is the leading cause of death in children in the United States. And five minutes after I tweeted that, the person who is in charge of the Congress for next year reached out to me and said, let's make that happen. So that's a way that you can see immediate changes for some of that. I've also reached out to elected officials when I was doing an AAP legislative lobby day and I couldn't get a hold of them to make an office. I tweeted at them. Five minutes later, the representatives tweeted me back, and I had an appointment with them later that day. So people look at that, and people follow that. Again, when I am in a professional capacity, I am very careful to make sure that anything that I tweet or retweet is supported by evidence, or I'll say this is my opinion. Because I do have a little bit, not as much as I used to, but I do have a little bit of a following on Twitter, and I don't want people to be looking at that and trusting me and what I am saying without me going to the effort of making sure that that is factually correct. So I have not mastered the art of separating personal and professional, and in some ways I have not needed to, and that's in part because I live in a state and work in an organization that is very supportive of all the advocacy that I do. And then it's a way to communicate effectively to the public. So I think that that's really important to know. On a personal standpoint, if I want to say who I want to vote for, who I'm going to donate for, who I'm going to promote as a political candidate, I'm very clear to put that for my personal rather than my professional account. As a professional pediatrician who works for children, I'll work with anybody who will help kids. So these are just an example of some of the things that you might be interested in. I'm interested in every single one of these issues, but I do have my primary issues as well. So some advocacy tools that we can use. So professional organizations, including SCCM, do use their power to advocate for change on a systemic and legislative level. They impacted rules on changes in critical care. They have developed standards for professional conduct for COVID-19 treatment. They're active talking about vaccination, firearm injury prevention, the Health Care Workers Resilience Act, all these sorts of things that are important to all of us in this room. Through the American Academy of Pediatrics, if you are a pediatrician and interested in doing that, you can further go on to become a professional, sorry, an official spokesperson for the AAP, which is something that I have done. And sometimes I'll do interviews with them or with various outlets about all of these things that are important to me and important to the AAP. I did reach out to the people at SCCM, the media relations team at SCCM, and they have a lot of great work that they do, and they showed all of that to me, but they don't have the same kind of official spokesperson role where anybody in the Congress could be part of that as something like the AAP does. Speaking of media, in part because of my relationship that I've developed on Twitter, and in part because I just like to write and do op-eds, we have been able to develop relationships with different organizations like CNN and NBC, a little bit with CBN, but mostly NBC in Chicago, CBS in Chicago, and Fox in Chicago. And if they know that they have a story that they want to do on guns, either my public relations team will ask me if I'm available to do something like that, or sometimes the reporters will reach out to me directly. And sometimes I'll get the same opportunity from doing commentaries that I sometimes publish in the Tribune or the Sun Times or something like that, and have people reach out to me from that as well. So you can use the media to get to a larger population, a very large population, and you can use social media as a way to further spread that or to contact or be in contact and form relationships with those in the media so that you are able to have that reach. There's actually a fair amount of research on the effect of social media, but some of it conducted by people in this very room. Anne-Marie pointed one out earlier, and Dr. Khadadkar is back there supporting us, which I appreciate. But there's also been beyond Band-Aids for bullet holes, firearm violence is a public health priority. There have been specific things about outcomes of children with firearm injuries admitted to the pediatric ICU. And the reason that I put this in the social media part is that Dr. Tasker, who is the editor of SCCM, has made that open access and uses the PCCM website and Twitter and Instagram as a way to promote some of these sorts of things. So we are publishing there. They very much look at who is tweeting that out, where it gets shared on Instagram, where things come from. So that is very much a part of what they do for PCCM. Again, I talked about how you can reach out to elected officials. And you do not, by the way, have to do legislative lobbying to be an effective advocate just because I like to do it. And then the social media tools that we talked about, I put this at the bottom because it's a way to kind of put all that together. And to point out that SCCM does have a very active social media presence. And while they're not doing legislative lobbying, they are doing a lot of things on lobbying. And if I had time, I would have put in slides representing all the stuff that they talked about yesterday. I would have put in slides about talking about the indigenous culture that we heard about in the opening ceremony, about Dr. Adams' slides, about what Lauren Source, our incoming president, highlighted as her priority. So there's all kinds of things that we can do with that. Ann Marie already talked about the use of social media with caveats. So I'm going to kind of just very briefly talk about this. One thing that I would want to say is that there's, what, 40, 50 of us in here. It's a big room. So it doesn't look like that many. But I counted. However, we were both tagged in the post yesterday. There was analysis done of the hashtag PedsICU from January 15th to January 22nd. And that had 6 million impressions. No matter what I do here at the Congress, I'm not going to reach 6 million people. The majority of those tweets were in the last couple of days or during the Congress. And several of the people in this room were included on the list of the most influential people. So I know we don't like to promote ourselves too much. And I'm not on Twitter as much anymore. But just my tweets alone had 403,000 impressions as of yesterday. So that's something or this engagement that shows I'm not speaking to 400,000 of you here. But that is a way to get your voice out into the world. So I'm going to also skip this one because I have been a little bit verbose and Ann Marie already talked about this one. But same, that's what I'm just going to say, ditto to what she said before. So the benefits of social media for me, I have also formed genuine friendships, had a reach that I would never have done just on my own if I weren't involved in some of this. And then there's fun stuff too. Like I run the PelotonMed account badly these days because I'm not on Twitter very much. But people from Peloton have reached out to me. Sometimes people give me free things, but not very often. That's okay. So that's one of the benefits. We talked about advocacy. You can drive the conversation. You can power the conversation. You can combat misinformation, which is obviously very important. And the other way that I like to do is to amplify messages for people who are more expert on this subject than I am. If I want to tweet about gun violence, I think I am an expert in gun violence and I will do so. If I want to tweet about the lived experience of somebody with gun violence, that's not I haven't had that experience. So what I do is follow a lot of people who have had lived experiences and then I will retweet and amplify that for them. And then for networking, obviously I would, as I said, I would not be here without all of this. I'm in a community organization. We're not academic, so I don't publish all that much. I would not have had the opportunity to be here without this. I've done research with people like the Pick You Up. I was invited to, our institution was invited to be part of that. We've done stuff on gender inequity. We've done a couple of other things. And then I get invited to do a decent number of talks and presentations, which is fun because then I get to come here, meet more of you, and further get to talk about the things that I'm passionate about. And then professional. So a lot of people don't think that advocacy will move their professional career forward. I'm in a health policy scholars program that is through the Academic Pediatric Association and graduating this year. And there are things that we are working on, on advancing advocacy as a career path in academic medicine, similar to research or QI or education. One of these is the advocacy portfolio. However, I have managed to get secured, protected time from my institution, like a .05 FTE, which doesn't sound like all that much, it's a couple hours a year, but it's an investment in advocacy that our division has shown that it is worth it to them that I'm doing some of this stuff. By the way, SCCM is on all of these platforms, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, even YouTube, they have four TikTok videos, but I counted it. I have not mastered all of these. As I'm moving away from Twitter, I'm starting to transition a little bit more to Instagram professionally, but I haven't really found a professional home outside of Twitter or X just yet. We talked a little bit about this is our lane, but healthcare workers can have a positive influence on social media discourse. This study looked at Twitter discourse on firearm injury and COVID-19. They looked at specifically the hashtag, this is our lane, and get us PPE, and most of those were driven by healthcare providers, and were more likely to contain healthcare-specific language, language denoting positive emotions, affiliations, and group identity, and then more action-oriented content. We combat mis- and disinformation. The disinformation is more malicious, but the misinformation can get out there and cause just as much harm. There is documented research on using social media to make some of these impacts that is out there that Anne-Marie showed you a little bit as well. We happen to have a similar reach, so this is from the same study that she talked about, but I did take it a little bit further and cited, courtesy of Dr. Khadjadkar and Dr. Carroll, even though I didn't ask them, I hope that's okay. Anyway, she gives me the thumbs up now. You can see the spike in tweets at this conference in 2021, or sorry, this conference on the SCCM Congress. And then another thing when WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, and then another peak over here when there was an alert about the increase in PICU admissions for hyper-inflammatory symptoms. So you can see in real time that we're disseminating information in a way that would take a much longer time to do in a traditional journal. You can share infographics if you want to reach your patient population, you want them to get vaccinated, I want them to reduce their COVID-19 risk at Lollapalooza, all of these sorts of things. And you can do it in multiple languages so you can have an even broader reach. I just think that this is kind of one of the best ways that I've seen, The Onion is obviously not a medical organization, but every time there is a mass shooting, they'll tweet out, no way to prevent this, says only nation where this regularly happens. And every time they tweet that out, I retweet it. We had talked a little bit about the firearm injury prevention advocacy, and I'm going to just take one extra minute because I think I'm running a little bit behind, but it had a huge impact on medical providers after the NRA tweeted out that somebody should tell anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane. So this mobilized an entire movement of healthcare workers joining forces, finding a common thread and a way that they could talk about gun violence, and it led to lots of research. It led to coalitions and all kinds of things that may or may not have happened had we not had that kind of spark that lit the fire. So you can see, it just is a little bit of a timeline here for the This Is Our Lane hashtag. There were over 500,000 tweets in about six months period, and that was picked up by 350 mass media publications. So it led to scientific research, and it led to exposure throughout the media. I also use it to talk about safer storage because I talked about that that's my passion. And if we in critical care do not use some of this, we are going to be left behind. There's tons of other organizations that are using this, and they're using it as effective targeted strategies. Women in cardiology, social media for health advocacy in surgeries, they're talking about internal medicine, even dermatology. I didn't mean to make that sound so scornful. I like dermatologists. Cardio-oncology, OB-GYN. So other people are using this. The AAP used to be Tweediatrician. Now you can sign up to do this official socialpedia thing, and they will send you things that are related to advocacy that you can post on Twitter, and I've made lots of friends that way as well. And then to just close, I am one minute and 45 seconds over. So closing on the same side that Anne-Marie did, to encourage you to become an SCCM engagement ambassador and to follow SCCM on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all those platforms. So thank you so much for listening, and I really appreciate it, and we would love to take questions.

social media

public health advocacy

clinicians

misinformation

professional backlash

policy change

networking

COVID-19 pandemic