Social Media in Health

Infoveillance can be defined as “the application of infodemiology with the aim of surveillance”. In other words, it refers to surveilling and analyzing the information found over the internet in an unstructured manner to inform public health and policies (Junhan & Wang, 2021).

Social media can be used to predict future illness onset for users by analyzing the language and keywords used on social media. Moreover, analyzing emojis and special characters used in social media posts can help predict certain mental health illnesses, asthma, or difficulty breathing syndrome (Edo-Osagie et al., 2019; Thorstad & Wolff, 2019).

Infoveillance also has the potential to predict different infectious disease outbreaks, such as in the COVID-19 where data shows that social media has the potential to accurately predicts the disease outbreak case count and to use geographical data from social media to inform medical research and practice (Junhan & Wang, 2021).