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

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 difficulty of identifying misinformation and punishing it, the echo chambers problem, issues concerning nudging, concerns about policy preset position, concerns for the management and prioritization of resources, and concerns about overlapping between social listening activities. Thus, social listening should be subject to certain rules. In the third section, this paper argues that social listening should be subject to the precautionary principle. Doan, Nie, and Fenton projected that the central teleology, the purpose, and the modus operandi of the precautionary principle could be identified in various policy and legal instruments and propositions, accordingly, the precautionary principle entails, inter alia, proactive preparation for public health matters, specifically emergencies, and assessment, e.g. risk–benefit analysis, taking into account uncertainty and past experiences. They showed the normative validity and necessity of applying the precautionary principle in its “moderate versions” to public health matters. It follows from this and the rationale underlying and the range of rules of the precautionary principle that the precautionary principle can offer some insights, solutions, and mechanisms to remedy issues posed by or related to social listening.