A scoping review of the use of Twitter for public health research

Abstract

Public health practitioners and researchers have used traditional medical databases to study and understand public health for a long time. Recently, social media data, particularly Twitter, has seen some use for public health purposes. Every large technological development in history has had an impact on the behaviour of society. The advent of the internet and social media is no different. Social media creates public streams of communication, and scientists are starting to understand that such data can provide some level of access into the people's opinions and situations. As such, this paper aims to review and synthesize the literature on Twitter applications for public health, highlighting current research and products in practice. A scoping review methodology was employed and four leading health, computer science and cross-disciplinary databases were searched. A total of 755 articles were retreived, 92 of which met the criteria for review. From the reviewed literature, six domains for the application of Twitter to public health were identified: (i) Surveillance; (ii) Event Detection; (iii) Pharmacovigilance; (iv) Forecasting; (v) Disease Tracking; and (vi) Geographic Identification. From our review, we were able to obtain a clear picture of the use of Twitter for public health. We gained insights into interesting observations such as how the popularity of different domains changed with time, the diseases and conditions studied and the different approaches to understanding each disease, which algorithms and techniques were popular with each domain, and more.

Real-time Twitter interactions during World Breastfeeding Week: A case study and social network analysis

“…Traditionally, analysis of Twitter activity has been limited to Twitter Analytics, a built-in data-tracking platform that provides basic impressions and engagement metrics (e.g., number of retweets, followers, mentions) [4]. However, recent advances in software analytics, grounded in social network theory, have made it possible to analyze Twitter data in much more nuanced, meaningful, and theoretically grounded ways [4]. In marketing, political, and education studies, these advances have been rapidly leveraged to influence consumer and citizen behavior but have been rarely used in public health communication [5][6][7][8][9].…”

“…In today’s digital world, using social media has become an important strategy to support public health efforts and outcomes [ 1 , 2 ]. Twitter, in particular, provides a unique source of big data, which supports monitoring, detecting, and forecasting disease outbreaks and health conditions (e.g., measles, Ebola, obesity, depression) as well as intervening through awareness campaigns [ 3 , 4 ]. The uniqueness of Twitter stems from its increased popularity among hundreds of millions of diverse users across countries and world regions, the ability to capture activity in real-time, and the relative ease to access publicly available content [ 3 ].…”

Social Media Insights Into US Mental Health Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic. A Longitudinal Twitter Analysis (JANUARY-APRIL 2020)

“…In other words, because users are naturally tweeting about “coronavirus”, “virus” and the “pandemic”, the inclusion of those words may not necessarily reflect the individuals’ well-being. Note, the resulting sample sizes for each corpora exceeds the mean observed in a recent scoping survey of the literature on social media analytics for public health by several orders of magnitude (n = 20,000) 23 , resulting in ample representation with which to conduct our analyses. Additionally, previous studies have used large-scale sentiment analysis to accurately predict social mood 24 , and how sentiment expressed on social media correlates with psychological well-being 25 .…”

Digital public health surveillance: a systematic scoping review

“…This was confirmed by a recent scoping review on using web-data for disease surveillance and epidemiology in which Mavragani studied 338 articles from 2009 to 2018 and highlighted the potential of digital surveillance in health informatics research 26 . Newer reviews on this subject have dealt with the popularity of different surveillance domains over time and summarized recent methodological developments mapped to each domain 27,28 . The most recent and extensive digital surveillance review 28 has pictured a timeline, tracking interest online for PH and solely focused on ethical and validity issues ripe in the digital health monitoring revolution.…”