Social Media Big Data

Emerging Research in Social Media Big Data for Public Health Interventions

The reports described in the previous section have illustrated “infodemiology” techniques that leverage big data from social media for timely insights that could inform the development of critical public health responses. Other researchers have further described the amalgamation of multimodal data from social media complemented by other sources such as traditional news media and online behaviour/market research agency platforms to inform the development of evidence-based public health interventions. These capabilities have been demonstrated for the evaluation of the public’s compliance to public health measures as well as the evaluation of national responses to help control the pandemic in China, using data from social media such as Weibo and Tik Tok, the People’s Daily major Chinese newspaper, and online market research agency platforms such as Mob-Tech research institute (Hua and Shaw, 2020).

Researchers have further demonstrated the potential utility of new techniques such as Online Ecological Recognition (OER) that combine big data with other emerging technology domains like artificial intelligence (AI) to develop predictive models (Li S. et al., 2020). This facilitated additional applications beyond the surveillance of information, to evaluating the mental health impact of the pandemic itself. The study demonstrated that negative emotions and sensitivity to social risks increased while positive emotions and life satisfaction plummeted (Li S. et al., 2020). The results from this particular study corroborated with the Behavioural Immune System (BIS) theory that people tend towards negative emotions when threatened by disease, whereby the spike in negative emotion was heightened during COVID-19 due to the infodemic.

However, another study of 17,865 Weibo users in China highlighted a silver lining regarding the impact of social media during this pandemic, whereby initial negative emotions (after COVID-19 was reported widely) were subsequently balanced by positive emotions as users leveraged social media platforms for peer-support, with trending topics such as “faith” and “blessing”. (Li S. et al., 2020). These terms reflect greater group cohesiveness given the threat to greater public, and these findings were further replicated in Lombardy based on data from Italy (Su et al., 2020). Notably, the increased group cohesion occurred in tandem with more monetary and supply donations to regions of need and key organisations including the Hubei Red Cross (Li S. et al., 2020). It is thus evident that social media can be leveraged for positive impact, by helping to connect individuals during a crisis and improve individual alignment for common good. This has additional implications for other aspects of medication, including the use of these platforms for health promotion and raising awareness about critical health-related problems (Horrell et al., 2019). Through further investigation and refinement of these methods, public health organisations will be able to optimise response strategies in real-time by extrapolating trends in transmission, communication content, information flow, and population sentiment.