VIDEO: Over 50% of doctors report harassment on social media

Key takeaways:

• Eighty-eight percent of doctors who reported harassment attributed it to their advocacy.
• Losing physician voices on social media would mean losing their personal narratives about public health.

In this video, Tricia Rae Pendergrast, MD, discusses the harassment doctors face on social media and the implications it can have.

Pendergrast, resident physician at Michigan Medicine, and colleagues conducted a study before the pandemic in which 23.3% of doctors reported harassment on social media. Now, findings of a similar study show that statistic has jumped to 66%.

While Pendergrast and colleagues allowed doctors to self-define harassment in the surveys, many respondents reported having received death threats.

For physicians looking for a safer way to use social media without leaving the platforms completely, Pendergrast suggests joining Amplifiers.

“That’s our term for a unified group of experts or health care professionals that have a gathering space,” Pendergrast says in the video. “A lot of the time it’s a direct message on Twitter ... where if harassment does happen, you do have a place virtually that you can go and say, “Hey, I’m being attacked.”

However, more help is needed. Pendergrast suggests that if the Sergeant General and health care institutions continue to expect physicians to fight misinformation on social media, those groups implement protections against harassment.

“As a resident, it is frustrating to be working this hard to join a profession and go on social media to see people I respect advocate for public health and be harassed because of it,” Pendergrast told Healio. “It is hard to stomach that because I’m a doctor — because I believe in vaccines and common-sense gun laws and that everyone should have access to the full spectrum of reproductive health, that people think I deserve to be harassed.”