Social Media Recruitment in Indigenous and Native American Populations: Challenges in the AI Age.

Publication date: Sep 17, 2025

Using social media recruitment for public health research presents both opportunities and challenges. Despite its increased use, few studies have detailed the practical issues, challenges encountered, and alternative strategies available for social media recruitment. This paper explores strategies for recruiting Indigenous and Native American populations in California for a study on COVID-19 vaccination and social networks. We describe different recruitment approaches, challenges faced, and pros and cons of strategies used to enhance data quality and efficiency, including survey design considerations, Facebook targeting versus use of research panels, quality assurance checks, and decisions around participant incentives. Our local setting involved recruiting Native American and Mesoamerican Indigenous individuals living in California through social media platforms. We highlight key adaptations to survey design, recruitment strategies, and data cleaning processes, noting what approaches that were effective and those that were not. Despite targeted efforts and community collaboration, recruitment was limited, and fraudulent data from bots significantly compromised data quality. Standard Facebook targeting approaches were largely unsuccessful. Our findings suggest that the increasing sophistication of artificial intelligence is becoming a substantial obstacle to authentic participant recruitment through social media. We offer recommendations to improve recruitment of hard-to-reach populations and mitigate AI-related fraud risks in future research.

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