Social Media: Hope or Hype?
Social media has revolutionised modern day communication with significant potential for public health intelligence. Studies demonstrate the promising capacity of social media to improve surveillance through early event detection. Identifying different social media platforms, understanding how people communicate through them and understanding how public health stakeholders can ethically integrate them within the context of early warning is therefore a necessary exercise, but one fraught with challenges. This interactive panel will discuss different strategies and experiences in using social media for public health intelligence.
EMRO: Using Social Media Monitoring for signal detection in the DVA process
Mahmoud Sadek, Technical Officer, World Health Organization Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean
This presentation will describe the WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean's (EMRO) experience in social media scanning for signal/event detection and follow up. It will highlight detection, verification and assessment activities at EMRO and the need for using social media to improve the early detection function. Moreover, it will describe the used methodology for social media scanning and its results. Finally, lessons learned and proposed next steps will be shared.
Social media trend analysis for early detection
Thomas Mollet, Leader of Epidemic Intelligence group, European Center for Disease Prevention and Control
ECDC is implementing a new method for early detection based on social media metadata trend analysis. This includes the analysis of the volume of social media posts by topic and time but also the analysis of queries in Google and Wikipedia. A pilot project has been initiated in 2019 and the approach will complement the classical event-based surveillance in the fields of early detection, rumours detection as well as sentiment analysis and anti-vax debate monitoring.
Using Social Media for Public Health Intelligence
Jaemar Miller, Data and Security Engineer, UN Global Pulse
This presentation will showcase various projects conducted by UN Global Pulse and various partner agencies around social media analysis, primarily around health topics, including "Social Media Monitoring of Discrimination and HIV Testing," which was conducted in 2015 following the Brazil World Cup and the "Projeta o gol" campaign for safe sex along with HIV/AIDS testing and awareness; "Nowcasting Food Prices with Twitter in Indonesia," which showcases modeling of data to track food commodity prices; "Hazegazer," which displays Air Quality Index data with social media data around haze from possible wildfires in South East Asia region; "Qatalog," an internal tool that is being developed to allow analysis from various data sources using machine learning such as topic modeling, term association, vector model training along with visualization graphs and maps to highlight each use case; and, lastly, "Radio Mining" to showcase insights from automatic speech recognition from public broadcast radio in indigenous languages.
Nigeria: Using Tataafo for social media and web mining in event-based surveillance
Muntari Hassan, Assistant Director, Nigeria Centers for Disease Control (NCDC)
This presentation will highlight Nigeria CDC's experience with using the Connect Center and systematic horizon scanning (Tataafo) for detection, verification, assessment, analysis and communication. We will hear about current gaps, success stories as well as the way forward.