Everyone assumes young people get their health news from TikTok and Instagram. When we asked 1,185 of them, the answer was the university inbox.
There’s a story public health communicators tell themselves, and it goes like this: young adults are hard to reach, they ignore official messaging, and if you want them to hear you during a crisis, you have to meet them where they live, which means social media.
It’s a reasonable story. It’s also one that almost nobody had tested.
So my colleagues and I tested it. Our new study, Institutional Channels Over Social Media: Digital Risk Communication, Community Engagement, and Protective Behavior Adoption Among Young Adults in a Pandemic Context, published in the Journal of Health Communication, surveyed 1,185 adults recruited through a U.S. university network during the COVID-19 pandemic. Most were between 18 and 29. We wanted to know two things: where did they actually get their COVID-19 information, and what moved them to protect themselves?
The answers surprised a lot of people, including some of us.
The inbox beat the feed
When we asked participants which channels they used for COVID-19 information over the previous year, the top two weren’t social platforms at all.
- University email: 25.5%
- Official university websites: 19.4%
- Text messages: 13.0%
- Instagram: 12.1%
- Facebook: 8.3%
- Twitter/X: 8.0%
Put together, institutional channels accounted for nearly 45% of how this group accessed pandemic information. No single social platform came close to either one.
This is a generation that grew up online, and when the stakes were real, they went to the source. That makes sense. During the pandemic, social media was flooded with rumors, hot takes, and well-meaning people getting it wrong. In that kind of noise, an email from your university carries a signal a viral post can’t: this is official, this applies to you, and someone is accountable for it.
Information isn’t enough. People have to feel the risk.
The second part of our study looked at what turned communication into action: wearing masks, distancing, washing hands, getting tested, trusting vaccines.
We used the World Health Organization’s Risk Communication and Community Engagement (RCCE) framework, which holds that engagement comes first. When institutions show up for a community, by handing out masks and sanitizer, sharing where to get vaccinated, and earning trust in their safety measures, that engagement shapes two things:
- Risk communication: whether people feel they’re getting accurate, sufficient, trustworthy information.
- Risk perception: whether people grasp how serious the threat is and that it applies to them and the people close to them.
Both of those, in turn, drove protective behavior. All six relationships we tested held up.
But the most interesting finding was about which pathway mattered more. Community engagement did a better job of informing people (β = 0.52) than of changing how they saw their own risk (β = 0.43). Yet it was risk perception that had the stronger pull on what people actually did (β = 0.30 versus 0.21).
In plain terms: institutions were good at getting the facts out. They were less good at making people feel those facts applied to them. And feeling it is what changed behavior.
Five takeaways for communicators, journalists, and anyone planning for the next crisis
1. Don’t confuse reach with influence.
A post with a million views isn’t the same as a message that changes what people do. Ask which channels your audience trusts, not just which ones they scroll.
2. Your official channels are an underused asset.
If you run communications for a university, hospital, city, or employer, your email list and website aren’t boring legacy tools. In a crisis, they may be your most credible ones. Invest in them before you need them: clear writing, fast updates, and a reputation for being right.
3. Measure your audience; don’t assume it.
The RCCE framework tells institutions to use the channels communities trust, but it doesn’t say how to find out which ones those are. Most organizations guess based on demographics. A short survey of your own people will tell you more than any generational stereotype.
4. Make it personal, not just accurate.
Accurate information is the floor, not the ceiling. The messages that move people help them see the threat in their own lives: their roommate, their grandparent, their semester. If your crisis messaging reads like a policy memo, it’s informing people without persuading them.
5. Engagement comes before messaging.
Sending more messages won’t save a strategy that skips the relationship. The institutions that handed out masks, answered questions, and earned trust over time were the ones whose messages landed. Credibility is built in calm periods and spent in crises.
A note for journalists
If you’re covering public health, this has a practical edge. When you’re trying to understand how a community is receiving guidance, don’t stop at trending hashtags. Ask people where they actually looked. The quieter channels, like an email from a dean or a page on a county health site, may be doing more of the work than the social media conversation suggests.
The caveats
Every study has limits, and ours are worth naming. Our participants were connected to a U.S. university, so they had steady access to institutional email and a natural reason to trust it. Communities without that kind of anchor institution may rely on very different channels. Responses were self-reported and looked back over a year, which invites some memory error. And communication explained about a fifth of the variation in protective behavior, a reminder that behavior has many drivers beyond the messages people receive.
We’d love to see this replicated in more diverse settings, especially as trust in institutions continues to shift after the pandemic.
The bottom line
The lesson isn’t that social media doesn’t matter. When our participants did turn to social platforms, Instagram led the way, which tells us visual, community-centered formats have a role. The lesson is that credibility, not reach, is what makes risk communication work.
The next public health emergency is a question of when, not if. The institutions that spend the time between crises building trust and keeping their official channels sharp will be the ones people listen to when it counts.
Read the full study:
Khan, L. M., Otieno, A. W., Hussain, K., Elhersh, G. A., & Kondam, N. R. (2026). Institutional channels over social media: Digital risk communication, community engagement, and protective behavior adoption among young adults in a pandemic context. Journal of Health Communication. https://doi.org/10.1080/10810730.2026.2750439.
With thanks to my co-authors Aggrey Willis Otieno (Utah State University), Khalid Hussain (Sultan Qaboos University), Ghanem Ayed Elhersh (Stephen F. Austin State University), and Nikhil Reddy Kondam (Ohio University).
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