Time for Medicine and Public Health to Leave Platform X
Toomas Timpka

TL;DR
This paper argues that health institutions should move away from commercial social media platforms like X and adopt open social media to better protect public health communication.
Contribution
The paper introduces the fediverse as a viable alternative for medical and public health knowledge translation.
Findings
Commercial social media platforms prioritize profit over public health communication integrity.
Open social media platforms like the fediverse allow institutions to maintain control while enabling cross-platform communication.
Examples of successful medical knowledge translation via open social media are emerging.
Abstract
For more than 50 years, digital technologies have been employed for the creation and distribution of knowledge in health services. In the last decade, digital social media have been developed for applications in clinical decision support and population health monitoring. Recently, these technologies have also been used for knowledge translation, such as in the process where research findings created in academic settings are established as evidence and distributed for use in clinical practice, policy making, and health self-management. To date, it has been common for medical and public health institutions to have social media accounts for the dissemination of novel research findings and to facilitate conversations about these findings. However, recent events such as the transformation of the microblog Twitter to platform X have brought to light the need for the social media industry to…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsSocial Media in Health Education · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Health Literacy and Information Accessibility
