Please watch Video 2. And now let’s discuss benefits and challenges of Twitter-based risk communication of the 2009 Swine Flu Pandemic. The practical assignment consists of providing at least one benefit and at least one challenge based on the information you get from Video 2.
This discussion is the second part of your practical assignments for Week 7. You can get up to 2 points for participating in this discussion.
Benefit: People got important medical information wherever they were.
Challenge: Not all people who posted "I have swine flu" or "I have flu" were really sick, so the statistics could have been a bit innacurate.
Benefit: People will get knowledge.information and they become more aware.
Challenge: what happen if someone post wrong data or information
To my mind, the benefit is public reaction time after a translated message and the challenge is to concur public messages with professional information with quality and evidence. Mostly, public tweets in real time overcome professional messages.
Benefits: online coverage, providing an sharing information about symptoms, early prediction of pandemic boost.
Challenges: fake panics by sharing "self-diagnosis for swine flu".
The data collected from tweets let researchers to predict the spike of disease about two weeks before the official surveillance data showed it.
One of the challenges is that for public risk communication the information starts to spread more quickly if it is put not on governmental and agencies websites, but on leading news channels, for example BBC.
Benefit: The research highlighted the ever increasing user generated content online and how it can be leveraged for data gathering.
The challenge is scientifically verifying these info for quality assurance.
Interesting study...
Benefits - for WHO - news of the swine flu epidemic is quickly spread by social media; people can be aware of the risk of the flu and be vigilant about washing hands and watching for signs and symptoms.
Disadvantage - I wonder how many people assumed they had 'the flu' who didn't? And tweeted about it? People still equate gastro-intestinal-related illnesses with flu (a respiratory illness), for example.
Also, there is a conceptual framework concerning the amplification of risk (Kasperson et al., 1988. The Social Amplification of Risk: A conceptual framework) - where social, cultural, psychological responses to threats/hazards, etc., amplify or attenuate risk responses. The role of social media in amplifying or attenuating risk perception is an interesting question.
The method ensured fast informing of the public. Unfortunately, the subsequent posts skewed real data.
