The bad and ugly about social media

In this video I’m going to explain and talk about the bad and ugly of social media in health care. And as we discuss in our earlier video, there are a lot of information and a lot of videos available on YouTube, on social media. But there is no authentication. And this is one of the examples.

We try to find out how this misinformation is carried out. And is there any characteristics or is there any future for these makers, why these people are making, and how they are disseminating the videos.And our study reveals that bad videos– by which I mean the videos which are disseminating unhealthy or misleading information– are liked three times more than the good videos. And these videos are shared much more times than the good videos. So the question is why. Well, one of the reasons, one of the recommendations that we were seeing is the making of the video by itself. If you use, like, very good background, very good music with celebrities in the videos, then definitely people like–interest likes more.

They don’t concentrate on what you are talking about or what the information is much about. So here is the results of our Pro-Anorexia. We have taken, like, an example of anorexia.By Pro-Anorexia we mean the video’s promoting anorexia. And you’ll see, like, people are, like, three times more sharing it and liking it. And also, we made a research on Flickr. It’s only for pictures. Still you see how people are badly affected or they are like, very likely to go to these websites and see pictures of skinny people and like that and think, like, skinny is a beauty. So these are just one examples. If you go, you can find similar examples with the rest of the diseases also.

So what I mean to say, here, is we have good information and bad information available online. We need to learn how we can distinguish useful information or what to say from misleading information.And you’ll see, this slide shows about how Pro and anti-anorexia in Flickr are liked by each other, how they are making it cluster. Because what found is there is a network of people who are always promoting bad things or misleading information. And there are a few group of people from health care providers, from CDC, they attempt to make videos. But unfortunately they don’t get much likes or they don’t get much views.

And one of the recommendation in our paper was, again, as I told, we need to learn from the tactics of the people who are making bad videos. We need to learn to use, like, good music, good backgrounds, celebrities, in order to give useful information. Then, the video will be more widely viewed.

On the other hand, we need to have some algorithms which can block the people. Because it’s logical if I am like, Pro-anorexic person, so most of the times or every time I publish one related to pro-anorexia. But if I am, like, good guy working in health care provider, I usually publish things which are meaningful, which are useful for the readers. So we need to have some sort of authenticate people. Or we should have some sort of algorithms which provide the search if someone types, like, anorexia. Then the good videos should come on the top list. And bad videos should go on the bottom list or in the next pages. Then we need to have other, also, crowdsourcing.

People, authentic people, saying that if they say good, then those should be at the top list of the search. And if those people say, bad, then those videos should be at that bottom list. Also, we have, like, we can block the IDs where once we know, OK, the given person is publishing misleading information, we can block his ID so that he cannot publish a video with the same ID. Definitely he need to make new ID. And it may take some time. And now I want to talk about the ugly part. And it is about anti-vaccination online movement, which is really hurting lot of people. They are changing the mindset of the people. They are recommending like vaccinations are very bad.

They cause the disease. They are not useful. So this is, like, one of the examples I am talking about. And this is from global concern that “With ever increasing access to Internet-based information an unsubstantiated rumour about vaccines can rapidly circle the globe and undermine immunisation services, sparking outbreaks of disease and untold deaths.” This was about cervical cancer. If the people had, like, a vaccination, then it’s great chances of decreasing the prevalence of cervical cancer. And also, there are various movement. And you can see, even, the video here, which, again, talks about how vaccinations is bad. So it’s really of great concern how we can deal, how we tackle with such videos. And this is another thing.

If you’ll see, there are like, one million views for the video, Anti-vaccination thing. So that is how things are going here. And who is winning in the battle is the one who is disseminating bad information. Because first of all, they lead the community with encouraging, with promoting this misleading information. On the other hand, the videos made by the health providers are like, not very attractive. So we should focus on these two things. And I hope people, in future, will come up with attractive videos, the videos which will be liked by the youngsters.

So this is about studies showing that with questions regarding about vaccination, the most researched source are physicians. However, 70% will check Internet. Only 30% goes to physicians. And this shows about how social networking works when there is some outbreak, epidemiology with it. Given vaccine is work or not, all those things. And here is map of vaccine, anti-vaccines. And there are a lot of groups who are working with this. So at the end, what I want to ask you guys is– OK my question is like that– how you can come up with an idea which mitigates or which can come over all of this bad, misleading information on social media or on YouTube, on whatever. Thank you.