January 31, 2024 – Political divisions that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic prompted an uptick in online harassment of people working in the public health arena—and the harassment hasn’t died down. In response, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Health Communication (CHC) has produced a Digital Safety Kit for Public Health that aims to help public health workers and researchers navigate hostile online experiences and perhaps avoid them altogether.
The toolkit was put together by Samuel Mendez, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Mendez, who focuses on organizational health literacy and online communication, is also a research assistant and student advisory board member at the CHC. The kit, which Mendez wrote about in a January 23 opinion piece in Harvard Public Health, provides a wealth of information about online harassment—how to recognize it, how to respond, how to make a plan to protect yourself, and what institutions can do.
The idea for the toolkit grew, in part, as Mendez watched colleagues, including doctors, scientists, and public health communicators, experience online harassment—and have to deal with it mostly on their own.
“My friends and peers, even those at a university or research center, have found that they can’t count right now on their institutions to have a lot of resources lined up to respond effectively,” Mendez said in an interview. “There are guides from content creators and streamers and social media influencers that offer a lot of individual advice—for instance, how to keep your public profile separate from your personal profile—and it’s great that those resources are available. But I found that existing advice doesn’t really translate well to public health, because in the world of public health a certain amount of your professional information has to be public because you get federal