Patients Are Turning to TikTok for Health Information-Here's What Clinicians Need to Know.

This Medical News article discusses research on health information being shared on the social media platform.

Learning through the grapevine and the impact of the breadth and depth of social networks.

We study how communication platforms can improve social learning without censoring or fact-checking messages, when they have members who deliberately and/or inadvertently distort information. Message fidelity depends on social network depth (how many times information can be relayed) and breadth (the number of others with whom a typical user shares information). We characterize how the expected number of true minus false messages depends on breadth and depth of the network and the noise structure. Message fidelity can be improved by capping depth or, if that is not possible, limiting breadth, e.g., by capping the number of people to whom someone can forward a given message. Although caps reduce total communication, they increase the fraction of received messages that have traveled shorter distances and have had less opportunity to be altered, thereby increasing the signal-to-noise ratio.

Quantifying social organization and political polarization in online platforms.

Mass selection into groups of like-minded individuals may be fragmenting and polarizing online society, particularly with respect to partisan differences1-4. However, our ability to measure the social makeup of online communities and in turn, to understand the social organization of online platforms, is limited by the pseudonymous, unstructured and large-scale nature of digital discussion. Here we develop a neural-embedding methodology to quantify the positioning of online communities along social dimensions by leveraging large-scale patterns of aggregate behaviour. Applying our methodology to 5.1 billion comments made in 10,000 communities over 14 years on Reddit, we measure how the macroscale community structure is organized with respect to age, gender and US political partisanship. Examining political content, we find that Reddit underwent a significant polarization event around the 2016 US presidential election. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, individual-level polarization is rare; the system-level shift in 2016 was disproportionately driven by the arrival of new users. Political polarization on Reddit is unrelated to previous activity on the platform and is instead temporally aligned with external events. We also observe a stark ideological asymmetry, with the sharp increase in polarization in 2016 being entirely attributable to changes in right-wing activity. This methodology is broadly applicable to the study of online interaction, and our findings have implications for the design of online platforms, understanding the social contexts of online behaviour, and quantifying the dynamics and mechanisms of online polarization.

Trick or treat: Social Media's dissemination power of ophthalmologic information in the pandemic context.

Social Media in the COVID-19 pandemic context has become a real dissemination medium of ophthalmology information for both physicians and health care consumers. This trend of sharing information has revealed new and innovative interventions in Ophthalmology such as teleophthalmology on Social Media by providing synchronous and asynchronous consultations, education, and prevention solutions as well as scientific research findings. This paper is a review of the current challenges and limitations faced by ophthalmologists and health care consumers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Will Podcasting and Social Media Replace Journals and Traditional Science Communication? No, but...

The digital world in which we live is changing rapidly. The evolving media environment is having a direct impact on traditional forms of communication and knowledge translation in public health and epidemiology. Openly accessible digital media can be used to reach a broader and more diverse audience of trainees, scientists, and the lay public than can traditional forms of scientific communication. The new digital landscape for delivering content is vast, and new platforms are continuously being added. In this article, we focus on several, including Twitter and podcasting, and discuss their relevance to epidemiology and science communication. We highlight 3 key reasons why we think epidemiologists should be engaging with these mediums: 1) science communication, 2) career advancement, and 3) development of a community and public service. Other positive and negative consequences of engaging in these forms of new media are also discussed. The authors of this commentary are all engaged in social media and podcasting for scientific communication, and we reflect on our experiences with these mediums as tools to advance the field of epidemiology.

Professional Networking for Health Information Management/Technology Students and New Graduates: A Survey of HIM Professionals in Michigan.

The purpose of this survey was to gather advice on professional networking to assist health information management/technology students and new graduates. An online survey was sent to members of the Michigan Health Information Management Association (MHIMA) through a series of e-mails with 119 responses. Open-ended questions were analyzed using qualitative summative content analysis. Overall trends identified from the advice were to be active in the health information management (HIM) community and engage in positive relationships while avoiding negative or self-centered behaviors. Online networking activities were also recommended to be included in the process although not as the only means of networking. Attending regional and state HIM association events and volunteering with regional associations were selected most often as effective networking activities.

Factors Influencing the Dissemination of Tweets at the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress 2018.

BACKGROUND: Social media is increasingly used in surgery, facilitating the dissemination of knowledge. Social media can potentially aid networking, education, and information exchange. This study explored the impact of tweet components and tweeter characteristics during a large surgical congress to inform recommendations for optimizing social media use at future surgical conferences. METHODS: Twitter activity was monitored during the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress 2018 using NodeXL to extract tweets containing the conference hashtag #ACSCC18 (or #ACSCC2018). Multivariable logistic regression analysis was performed to identify independent predictors of retweet activity, also testing for multicollinearity and interactions among variables. RESULTS: There were 4386 tweets that contained #ACSCC18 (or #ACSCC2018) posted from 1023 Twitter accounts. A larger group of Twitter accounts just retweeted. Other Twitter accounts with a stake in the conference neither tweeted nor retweeted. In a multivariable analysis of original tweets, the following were all independently associated with retweets, in decreasing order of effect size: mention of other tweeters, multimedia, inclusion of other hashtags, and the number of followers. In contrast with other conferences, the inclusion of a weblink (URL)-for example, link to paper or blog-was not associated with retweets. DISCUSSION: This study helps understand social media impact at surgical conferences. Engage by tweeting and retweeting. Mention other tweeters, add multimedia, include congress hashtags and topic-specific hashtags, and build your followers. Although not associated with retweet activity in this study, the inclusion of URLs can still contribute in substantiating the disseminated content based on findings at other conferences.

More than words: how multimodal analysis can inform health professions education.

The contexts and methods for communicating in healthcare and health professions education (HPE) profoundly affect how we understand information, relate to others, and construct our identities. Multimodal analysis provides a method for exploring how we communicate using multiple modes-e.g., language, gestures, images-in concert with each other and within specific contexts. In this paper, we demonstrate how multimodal analysis helps us investigate the ways our communication practices shape healthcare and HPE. We provide an overview of the theoretical underpinnings, traditions, and methodologies of multimodal analysis. Then, we illustrate how to design and conduct a study using one particular approach to multimodal analysis, multimodal (inter)action analysis, using examples from a study focused on clinical reasoning and patient documentation. Finally, we suggest how multimodal analysis can be used to address a variety of HPE topics and contexts, highlighting the unique contributions multimodal analysis can offer to our field.

Quantifying and contextualizing the impact of bioRxiv preprints through automated social media audience segmentation.

Engagement with scientific manuscripts is frequently facilitated by Twitter and other social media platforms. As such, the demographics of a paper's social media audience provide a wealth of information about how scholarly research is transmitted, consumed, and interpreted by online communities. By paying attention to public perceptions of their publications, scientists can learn whether their research is stimulating positive scholarly and public thought. They can also become aware of potentially negative patterns of interest from groups that misinterpret their work in harmful ways, either willfully or unintentionally, and devise strategies for altering their messaging to mitigate these impacts. In this study, we collected 331,696 Twitter posts referencing 1,800 highly tweeted bioRxiv preprints and leveraged topic modeling to infer the characteristics of various communities engaging with each preprint on Twitter. We agnostically learned the characteristics of these audience sectors from keywords each user's followers provide in their Twitter biographies. We estimate that 96% of the preprints analyzed are dominated by academic audiences on Twitter, suggesting that social media attention does not always correspond to greater public exposure. We further demonstrate how our audience segmentation method can quantify the level of interest from nonspecialist audience sectors such as mental health advocates, dog lovers, video game developers, vegans, bitcoin investors, conspiracy theorists, journalists, religious groups, and political constituencies. Surprisingly, we also found that 10% of the preprints analyzed have sizable (>5%) audience sectors that are associated with right-wing white nationalist communities. Although none of these preprints appear to intentionally espouse any right-wing extremist messages, cases exist in which extremist appropriation comprises more than 50% of the tweets referencing a given preprint. These results present unique opportunities for improving and contextualizing the public discourse surrounding scientific research.

Framework for Managing the COVID-19 Infodemic: Methods and Results of an Online, Crowdsourced WHO Technical Consultation.

BACKGROUND: An infodemic is an overabundance of information-some accurate and some not-that occurs during an epidemic. In a similar manner to an epidemic, it spreads between humans via digital and physical information systems. It makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it. OBJECTIVE: A World Health Organization (WHO) technical consultation on responding to the infodemic related to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic was held, entirely online, to crowdsource suggested actions for a framework for infodemic management. METHODS: A group of policy makers, public health professionals, researchers, students, and other concerned stakeholders was joined by representatives of the media, social media platforms, various private sector organizations, and civil society to suggest and discuss actions for all parts of society, and multiple related professional and scientific disciplines, methods, and technologies. A total of 594 ideas for actions were crowdsourced online during the discussions and consolidated into suggestions for an infodemic management framework. RESULTS: The analysis team distilled the suggestions into a set of 50 proposed actions for a framework for managing infodemics in health emergencies. The consultation revealed six policy implications to consider. First, interventions and messages must be based on science and evidence, and must reach citizens and enable them to make informed decisions on how to protect themselves and their communities in a health emergency. Second, knowledge should be translated into actionable behavior-change messages, presented in ways that are understood by and accessible to all individuals in all parts of all societies. Third, governments should reach out to key communities to ensure their concerns and information needs are understood, tailoring advice and messages to address the audiences they represent. Fourth, to strengthen the analysis and amplification of information impact, strategic partnerships should be formed across all sectors, including but not limited to the social media and technology sectors, academia, and civil society. Fifth, health authorities should ensure that these actions are informed by reliable information that helps them understand the circulating narratives and changes in the flow of information, questions, and misinformation in communities. Sixth, following experiences to date in responding to the COVID-19 infodemic and the lessons from other disease outbreaks, infodemic management approaches should be further developed to support preparedness and response, and to inform risk mitigation, and be enhanced through data science and sociobehavioral and other research. CONCLUSIONS: The first version of this framework proposes five action areas in which WHO Member States and actors within society can apply, according to their mandate, an infodemic management approach adapted to national contexts and practices. Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and the related infodemic require swift, regular, systematic, and coordinated action from multiple sectors of society and government. It remains crucial that we promote trusted information and fight misinformation, thereby helping save lives.

The Covid-19 'infodemic': a new front for information professionals.

The virus, commonly known as COVID-19 which emerged in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, has spread in 213 countries, areas or territories around the globe, with nearly 144 683 deaths worldwide on 18 April 2020. In the wake of this pandemic, we have witnessed a massive infodemic with the public being bombarded with vast quantities of information, much of which is not scientifically correct. Fighting fake news is now the new front in the COVID-19 battle. This regular feature comments on the role of health sciences librarians and information professionals in combating the COVID-19 infodemic. To support their work, it draws attention to the myth busters, fact-checkers and credible sources relating to COVID-19. It also documents the guides that libraries have put together to help the general public, students and faculty recognise fake news.

How to Fight an Infodemic: The Four Pillars of Infodemic Management.

In this issue of the Journal of Medical Internet Research, the World Health Organization (WHO) is presenting a framework for managing the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) infodemic. Infodemiology is now acknowledged by public health organizations and the WHO as an important emerging scientific field and critical area of practice during a pandemic. From the perspective of being the first "infodemiologist" who originally coined the term almost two decades ago, I am positing four pillars of infodemic management: (1) information monitoring (infoveillance); (2) building eHealth Literacy and science literacy capacity; (3) encouraging knowledge refinement and quality improvement processes such as fact checking and peer-review; and (4) accurate and timely knowledge translation, minimizing distorting factors such as political or commercial influences. In the current COVID-19 pandemic, the United Nations has advocated that facts and science should be promoted and that these constitute the antidote to the current infodemic. This is in stark contrast to the realities of infodemic mismanagement and misguided upstream filtering, where social media platforms such as Twitter have advertising policies that sideline science organizations and science publishers, treating peer-reviewed science as "inappropriate content."

Adapting to the impact of COVID-19: Sharing stories, sharing practice.

Health Professions' Educators (HPEs) and their learners have to adapt their educational provision to rapidly changing and uncertain circumstances linked to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper reports on an AMEE-hosted webinar: Adapting to the impact of COVID-19: Sharing stories, sharing practice. Attended by over 500 colleagues from five continents, this webinar focused on the impact of the virus across the continuum of education and training. Short formal presentations on teaching and learning, assessment, selection and postgraduate training generated wide-ranging questions via the Chatbox. A thematic analysis of the Chatbox thread indicated the most pressing concerns and challenges educators were experiencing in having to adapt programmes and learning across the continuum of medical education and training. The main areas of concern were: campus-based teaching and learning; clinical teaching; selection and assessment, and educator needs. While there is clearly no one simple solution to the unprecedented issues medical education and training face currently, there were two over-arching messages. First, this is a time for colleagues across the globe to help and support each other. Second, many local responses and innovations could have the potential to change the shape of medical education and training in the future.