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Question 4: How far could social media monitoring go? Could our health and opinions one day be tracked in real time?
Video length: 03:04
Video transcript
(Dr. Norm Vinson is sitting at his desk. He addresses the camera.)
Traditional surveillance systems have two features that distinguish them from surveillance systems that would be based on social media. The first feature is diagnostic precision, or the probability of a false alarm. The second feature that I mentioned earlier is timeliness. Now if you think of a traditional surveillance system, typically the report of the illness or the event or the disease or whatever it is, is submitted by a clinician. Now in some cases it could be a public health official, but typically it's someone who has investigated the issue first and has come to a conclusion, and usually you can be pretty certain that the conclusion is correct. So someone would not say “hey, there's a case of measles,” when in reality, there is no measles. So that's the first issue.
In contrast, social media don’t have this feature so if I think that I’ve got measles and I tweet “hey, I think I’ve got measles,” you can’t really be certain that I really have measles, you can’t really be certain that's really a case of measles. Whereas in the case of a doctor saying a patient has measles, well then you can be sure about that.
Moreover, a lot of the traditional surveillance systems, before a physician or a clinician will report an event, there's a lab test. So the lab test provides further confirmation, but not only that it also specifies more details about what the illness is. So for example, if you get a flu test, the lab test will not only tell you that you have the flu, it will tell you what type of flu you have, say H1N1 or one of the other ones. Whereas surveillance of social media obviously don’t have this feature either.
So the two issues there are the possibility of a false alarm, which is much higher with social media, and the diagnostic precision, which is much higher with the traditional surveillance system.
Now again, with the traditional surveillance system, the problem is that it takes time. So if you feel sick for example, you might wait a few days, then you go to see the doctor, and the doctor says, “well you look sick, let’s do some tests.” The samples go away, the test results come back to the doctor and then, you know, maybe that day, maybe the next day, depending on what it is, the disease will be reported to public health. So... then it gets analyzed and then when the analysis is done, it comes back to the local units and then they know if there is something going on. Well that's about a week or maybe even more before you start to feel sick. Now, on the other hand if you are using Twitter a lot and you tweet, “wow, I'm starting to feel sick. I have this and that symptom,” well then that's a much faster indication that something is happening. And that's the primary advantage of social media surveillance is the timeliness.
(Text on screen: National Research Council Canada. Copyright Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada, represented by National Research Council of Canada, 2011)
(Canada Wordmark) 
ISSN 1927-0275 = Dimensions (Ottawa. Online)
