From “Infodemics” to Health Promotion: A Novel Framework for the Role of Social Media in Public Health

TLDR

Social media’s pervasive health communication has sparked debate over whether it harms or helps public health, yet no consensus or conceptual model exists, especially highlighted during the COVID‑19 infodemic. The authors propose the SPHERE continuum as a novel framework to guide the investigation and assessment of social media’s impact on public health. The SPHERE model maps social media functions—contagion, vector, surveillance, inoculant, disease control, and treatment—across the epidemic–response continuum, identifies how attributes of communications, diseases, pathogens, and hosts influence these functions, and outlines a comprehensive set of outcomes for evaluating effects on population health.

Abstract

Despite the ubiquity of health-related communications via social media, no consensus has emerged on whether this medium, on balance, jeopardizes or promotes public health. During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has been described as the source of a toxic “infodemic” or a valuable tool for public health. No conceptual model exists for examining the roles that social media can play with respect to population health. We present a novel framework to guide the investigation and assessment of the effects of social media on public health: the SPHERE (Social media and Public Health Epidemic and REsponse) continuum. This model illustrates the functions of social media across the epidemic–response continuum, ranging across contagion, vector, surveillance, inoculant, disease control, and treatment. We also describe attributes of the communications, diseases and pathogens, and hosts that influence whether certain functions dominate over others. Finally, we describe a comprehensive set of outcomes relevant to the evaluation of the effects of social media on the public’s health.