The framing of health technologies on social media by major actors: Prominent health issues and COVID-related public concerns

Abstract

Drawing from recent advances in the field of health sociology, our study highlights topics and framings of health technologies (HT) diffused online by more than 4,000 identified actors actively involved in HT discussions on Twitter. Adopting an exploratory approach, we distinguish between health institutions, specialists, and advocates, and we assess key topics and framings promoted online by these actors. First, we show that the geographical distribution of important actors correlates with the citizens' reliance on social media to seek health information. Then, relying on 'state-of-the-art' methods in textual analysis, we identify prevalent online topics and show that the United States focuses more on risk management and private funding, whereas Europe focuses more on health literacy, practitioners, and start-ups. Furthermore, institutions focus more on indirect, global, and strategic problematics, whereas specialists are more concerned with direct and concrete problems. We also use creative visualisations displaying semantic relationships along important dimensions of HT, notably in terms of concerns related to technological priorities, professional skills, and privacy issues, as well as a possible shift in concerns related to privacy issues before and after the COVID pandemic. We conclude by discussing future research paths, particularly by giving insights into what are potential further survey interests.