Social Media Big Data

What Lies Ahead

Our article has highlighted the potential impact of social media big data to be a double-edged sword. Presently, the negative impact has gained much visibility and criticism, due to limited mechanisms for differentiating reliable information from misinformation, and mitigating the risks of the latter. Fortunately, increasing coordination between social media platform providers, non-governmental organisations, and governments have given rise to promising collaborations such as the "Share verified" initiative led by the United Nations (UN) to build a freely-accessible resource of reliable health content and front-end flags to redirect individuals to reliable sources in order to address misinformation. Ultimately, long-term solutions may require new legislation to govern the creation and dissemination of misinformation online. Regulations have been effectively applied for other public health challenges, such as tobacco advertising regulations to reduce population exposure to marketing and cues to smoke.

However, in the case of online misinformation, the enforcement of such legislation will be significantly more complexed, given the scale of individuals as potential sources as opposed to corporations that are stakeholders within the tobacco industry. This will likely require methods such as COSMO for big data surveillance, with incorporation of AI analytics of the social media big data to scale up enforcement. This also begets consideration of developing alternatives and complements to social media as sources of reliable health information hosting and exchange, with several recently launched in response to COVID-19 misinformation. Online health communities (OHCs) have drawn increasing interest in the domain of virtual social networks due to their potential to amplify positive impact such as peer-support and quality data as a source of health evidence, as well as mitigate against negative impact through policies against the promotion of inaccurate information, as well as configurations that involve medical practitioners in moderation and content generation.

However, even with these measures in place, studies have highlighted the potential for lapses to occur that can be difficult to detect. Therefore, there is a growing need for OHCs that leverage the strengths of social media platforms with additional embodiments that mitigate against its weaknesses. These may be configurations that empower verified medical experts with digital tools to moderate the content and flow of information. These applications of OHCs for patients with chronic pain and mental health disorders that are likely to progress and increase in prevalence during COVID-19 have been described in earlier reviews led by relevant specialist. These digital platforms represent potential areas for future research and cross-disciplinary collaborations between technology partners, clinicians and regulators to enhance public health responses.

Callback before_footer in local_aigrade component should be migrated to new hook callback for core\hook\output\before_footer_html_generation

line 7225 of /lib/moodlelib.php: call to debugging()
line 7292 of /lib/moodlelib.php: call to {closure}()
line 71 of /lib/classes/hook/output/before_footer_html_generation.php: call to get_plugins_with_function()
line 987 of /lib/classes/output/core_renderer.php: call to core\hook\output\before_footer_html_generation->process_legacy_callbacks()
line 97 of /mod/book/tool/print/index.php: call to core\output\core_renderer->footer()