United Nations partners with Purpose to use influencers in ‘Verified’ campaign against COVID misinformation

Melissa Fleming, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, and Jeremy Hymans, founder and chairman of Purpose, described how a rapid UN–Purpose partnership launched an initiative called Verified in spring 2020 to counter COVID-19 misinformation.

Fleming said the Verified effort combined "all of the institutional credibility, the science and the global reach of the UN" with Purpose’s ability to craft unbranded, audience-specific content. "We formed this ... wonderful and very novel alliance," Jeremy Hymans said, adding that the campaign prioritized reaching audiences that mainstream outlets did not reach.

The Nut Graf: The Verified model shifted away from traditional, branded UN messaging toward distributed, influencer-driven content. Fleming and Hymans said the approach recruited volunteers, trained scientists and doctors to become social-media content creators, and used platforms such as TikTok to reach specific audience segments — an approach they said produced far greater engagement than conventional health communications.

Hymans described how Purpose identified charismatic vaccine scientists and taught them platform skills, turning them into what the speakers called "Team Halo"; he said this network later expanded to include "verified climate champions." "We turned those people from vaccine scientists into vaccine scientists and stars with huge audiences," Hymans said, noting the content achieved "billions and billions of views." Fleming said Verified deliberately used unbranded content in many cases so messages would travel through existing influencer ecosystems rather than be filtered out by audiences who distrust institutions.

Both speakers emphasized practical elements of the campaign: rapid coordination with broadcasters in regions such as Africa to deliver public-health messages at scale; recruiting and training volunteers to amplify factual content; and testing content formats to measure impact on vaccine confidence and uptake. Fleming said the UN’s shift also produced a broader set of recommendations and a formal set of principles: "we kind of started calling it information integrity," she said, referring to the subsequent UN Global Principles on Information Integrity announced by the secretary-general.

The conversation included examples of how unbranded, localized content reached audiences the UN could not reach with traditional fact sheets. Hymans used the example of working with YouTube comedians to reach young men in India; Fleming highlighted that volunteers overwhelmingly offered to help spread facts during the pandemic.

Looking ahead, both said the Verified model is being repurposed for climate communication by recruiting "climate champions" who can speak to different national audiences in local languages and formats. Jeremy Hymans closed by describing a verified champion in Indonesia whose social-media content grew his following from roughly 2,000 to about half a million, increasing engagement with his recycling work.

The conversation underscored two linked themes: that conventional institutional branding can limit reach in polarized environments, and that carefully designed, evidence-based influencer campaigns can complement traditional public-service messaging. The speakers said these tactics are not a substitute for scientific accuracy but a different way to make facts "human and compelling."