Swine Flu and Social Media

Foreign Policy 's techblogger Evgeny Morozov thinks that the swine flu outbreak is exposing Twitter's Achilles heel: it's herd mentality and lack of context:

Who knew that swine flu could also infect Twitter? Yet this is what appears to have happened in the last 24 hours, with thousands of Twitter users turning to their favorite service to query each other about this nascent and potentially lethal threat as well as to share news and latest developments from Mexico, Texas, Kansas and New York (you can check most recent Twitter updates on the subject by searching for “swine flu” and “#swineflu”). And despite all the recent Twitter-enthusiasm about this platform's unique power to alert millions of people in decentralized and previously unavailable ways, there are quite a few reasons to be concerned about Twitter's role in facilitating an unnecessary global panic about swine flu.

Morozov argues that Twitter, far from being a "global brain" that co-produces better understanding, is merely providing people with a platform to voice their ill-informed fears about swine flu. There's also a social dimension to the Twitter swing flu scare that goes beyond the "echo chamber" effect:

"Unlike basic internet search – which has been already been nicely used by Google to track emerging flu epidemics – Twitter seems to have introduced too much noise into the process: as opposed to search requests which are generally motivated only by a desire to learn more about a given subject, too many Twitter conversations about swine flu seem to be motivated by desires to fit in, do what one's friends do (i.e. tweet about it) or simply gain more popularity.

In situations like this, there is some pathological about people wanting to post yet another status update containing the coveted most-searched words – only for the sake of gaining more people to follow them. And yet the bottom line is that tracking the frequency of Twitter mentions of swine flu as a means of predicting anything thus becomes useless (however, there are plenty of other non-Twitter ways to track the epidemic and Mashable does a good job of summing them all up)."

What's very ironic about Morozov's sadly accurate critique is that Twitter's rise to fame as a communication medium was largely due to its disaster reporting function during the Mumbai attacks. Perhaps the lesson of the swine flu outbreak is that Twitter excels at geographically focused and instrumental events (such as terrorist attacks) but struggles when faced with distributed disasters like public health crises.

Comments

[Francois]

http://xkcd.com/574/

[A.E.]

That's brilliant! lulz

[Pattama]

Great analysis! Thanks. As a public health practitioner, I use twitter to get instant updates on the web. Health intelligence is an area that I would like to see more.

[A.E.]

Thanks, Pattama!

[translation]

Interesting article. Perhaps a better use of twitter would be if health authorities around the world would us it to provide updates to the public, and it's up to the public to follow the authorities rather than people who are just adding noise