When Infodemic Meets Epidemic: a Systematic Literature Review

TL;DR

This systematic review examines how social media is used in epidemic contexts, highlighting its potential for surveillance, misinformation management, and mental health support, while identifying gaps in proactive application and integration of findings.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of social media's role in epidemic management and identifies key themes and gaps for future research and application.

Findings

Social media enables epidemic surveillance and misinformation management.

There is a significant gap between retrospective analysis and prospective application.

Pro-active epidemic prevention using social media is crucial for containment.

Abstract

Epidemics and outbreaks present arduous challenges requiring both individual and communal efforts. Social media offer significant amounts of data that can be leveraged for bio-surveillance. They also provide a platform to quickly and efficiently reach a sizeable percentage of the population, hence their potential impact on various aspects of epidemic mitigation. The general objective of this systematic literature review is to provide a methodical overview of the integration of social media in different epidemic-related contexts. Three research questions were conceptualized for this review, resulting in over 10000 publications collected in the first PRISMA stage, 129 of which were selected for inclusion. A thematic method-oriented synthesis was undertaken and identified 5 main themes related to social media enabled epidemic surveillance, misinformation management, and mental health. Findings uncover a need for more robust applications of the lessons learned from epidemic post-mortem documentation. A vast gap exists between retrospective analysis of epidemic management and result integration in prospective studies. Harnessing the full potential of social media in epidemic related tasks requires streamlining the results of epidemic forecasting, public opinion understanding and misinformation propagation, all while keeping abreast of potential mental health implications. Pro-active prevention has thus become vital for epidemic curtailment and containment.