Social media as Twitter are used today by people to disseminate health information but also to share or exchange on their health. Based on this observation, recent studies showed that Twitter data can be used to monitor trends of infectious diseases such as influenza. These studies were mainly carried out in United States where Twitter is very popular1-4. In our knowledge, no research has been implemented in France to know whether Twitter data can be a complementary data source to monitor seasonal influenza epidemic.

Objective: To investigate whether Twitter data can be used as a proxy for the surveillance of the seasonal influenza epidemic in France and at the regional level.