Social Media Big Data: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (Un)truths

Social media has been a defining component of life in the 21st century, monetising peer-to-peer sharing of information. This has led to the formation of powerful platforms leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to effectively commoditise individual attention, with the average person spending over 2 h a day on social media (Statista, 2020). The ubiquity of these platforms underscores the need to better understand social media in the context of public health, in particular its potential risks and benefits. This will facilitate comprehensive assessment of its impact on healthcare services, development of mitigating strategies for its drawbacks, and identification of potential opportunities to leverage its strengths for the good of population health. These sentiments were recently echoed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in the context of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, calling upon member states to address misinformation through risk communication and timely dissemination of accurate information as a key pillar of national public health responses (World Health Organisation, 2020a). However, our collective experience during this pandemic highlights the limitations of our existing knowledge and approaches, as many countries continue to experience the spiralling social impact of misinformation related to COVID-19. This manuscript provides an overview of both the negative and positive public health impact of social media that has come to light in the course of COVID-19 with an emphasis on rampant disinformation during COVID-19, and concludes with potential future directions for research in this emerging area of public health. Viral Infodemic in Social Media outpaces the Pandemic in the Streets–the (Un)truths The COVID-19 outbreak that originated from Wuhan city, China, has already claimed over 1 million lives and infected over 40 million individuals since it was first reported in December 2019. With the initial spread of COVID-19 progressing to pandemic status, the WHO also recognized the parallel problem of widespread anxiety and emotional sharing of information through digital platforms. This imposed an additional strain on humanity’s coordinated attempts to eradicate COVID-19, hindering public health risk communication (The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 2020). Experts have studied big data in online search and social media with many reports highlighting surges in online misinformation in each region even before the uptick in confirmed cases (Hong et al., 2020). Poor quality online sources have drowned out official advisories with fake and potentially harmful information (Cuan-Baltazar et al., 2020). This presents major health concerns given the public’s difficulty in differentiating reliable from unreliable sources of medical information, even among individuals with good baseline health literacy (Huhta et al., 2018). Further aggravating this situation, the excessive amounts of misinformation interspersed with official sources of information shared across social media platforms has placed a heavy burden on the public to discern true from false information. The WHO has since identified this phenomenon as an “infodemic”, making calls for novel solutions to moderate the flow of accessible information and stem medical disinformation (World Health Organisation, 2020b). A recent survey of social media users in Kurdistan, Iraq further emphasised the negative impact of this problem, whereby the Edited by: Kok-Leong Ong, La Trobe University, Australia