Ethics Framework for Social Listening in Infodemic Management
Karel Caals1, Centre for Biomedical Ethics, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore 1Centre for Biomedical Ethics, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore Singapore
Abstract
An infodemic is an overabundance of information, including misinformation and disinformation, that surges during a public health emergency. At a technical level, infodemic management practices have evolved rapidly in recent years. Many tools devised in response to the COVID-19 pandemic have already been deployed in other outbreaks, such as Ebola, polio and cholera; and new tools are still being developed. Social Listening (SL), for instance, a corporate marketing tool now applied in public health, is based on big data analytics, and could be further enhanced by technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence.
At its core, SL is the process of gathering and analysing data on a large scale from both online and offline sources, about people’s questions, concerns, and circulating narratives and misinformation about health. Data gleaned from social media platforms and other online sources may be used to identify and understand outbreaks, geographic and demographic trends, networks, sentiment and behavioural responses to public health emergencies. Offline data collection may include rapid surveys, townhalls, or interviews with people in specific populations. These data are then integrated with other data from sources in the health system (e.g., health information systems), as well as outside of it (e.g., mobility data) to generate infodemic insights and inform strategies to manage infodemics.
However, the collection and use of this data presents ethical challenges, such as privacy and consent, which may engender distrust. For SL to effectively guide individuals, communities and health authorities, important ethical and legal concerns need to be addressed. This paper reports on findings from a systematic review of ethical concerns that have been highlighted in the literature, and discusses an ethics framework that is currently being developed by the World Health Organization in response.
Biography
Currently a Research Fellow at the NUS Centre for Biomedical Ethics (CBmE), Karel obtained a PhD in Health Geography, after qualitative field research on the training of healthcare professionals in Timor-Leste to establish the concept of the More-than-National Health System. As part of his interest in health systems, he researches the digitalisation of health, working on topics such as the ethics of artificial intelligence in healthcare and digital health surveillance. Additional interests include various topics in the field of research ethics, as well as stakeholder engagement via social media. As Assistant Editor of the Asian Bioethics Review, he manages and promotes a prominent journal in the field of bioethics.