User-generated content enabled by social media tools provide a stream of data that augment surveillance data. Current use of social media data focuses on identification of disease events. However, once identification occurs, the leveraging of social media in monitoring disease events remains unclear. To clarify this, we constructed a framework mapped to the surveillance cycle, to understand how social media can improve public health actions.
Objective
Recent scholarship has focused on using social media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) as a secondary data stream for disease event detection. However, reported implementations such as (4) underscore where the real value may lie in using social media for surveillance. We provide a framework to illuminate uses of social media beyond passive observation, and towards improving active responses to public health threats.