Graciela Gonzales-Hernandez, Associate Professor of Informatics in Biostatistics and Epidemiology, University of Pennsylvania, (USA)

Host: Fabio Rinaldi (UZH)

Abstract: 

Social media has grown in popularity for health-related research as it has become evident that it can be a good source of patient insights. Be it Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Amazon reviews or health forums, researchers have collected and processed user comments and published countless papers on different uses of social media data.

Using these data can be a perfectly acceptable research practice, provided they are used ethically and the research approach is solid. I will not discuss solid scientific principles and statistically sound methods for social media data use in this talk, though. Instead, I will focus on the much-debated ethical principles that should guide observational studies done with social media data, and what we should and should not do when dealing with it.