Social Listening and its Issues: What can the Precautionary Principle Advice?
Hai Thanh Doan

TL;DR
This paper examines the concept and challenges of social listening, suggesting the precautionary principle can help address its issues.
Contribution
The paper proposes applying the precautionary principle to manage social listening challenges in public health.
Findings
WHO's social listening concept is vague and inconsistent.
Social listening faces issues like misinformation, echo chambers, and resource management.
The precautionary principle offers solutions to these issues through proactive preparation and risk analysis.
Abstract
The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently initiated “social listening”. The first section of this paper investigates conceptual aspects of social listening. It demonstrates that the WHO’s descriptions of social listening are vague and inconsistent. Notwithstanding this, possibly, the WHO-envisaged social listening is constituted by three core components: (i) listening and monitoring, (ii) understanding, and (iii) engaging and nudging. It follows that there is an inherent relatedness between WHO-envisaged social listening and other “social-listening” activities. It follows that to investigate issues of or related to social listening, the inquiry should be broadened to general practices of “social listening”, and experiences related to these must be considered. In the second section, this paper finds several issues with or related to social listening, including bad faith uses, the…
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Taxonomy
TopicsRisk Perception and Management · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Legal and Constitutional Studies
