The Use of Social Media in Detecting Drug Safety–Related New Black Box Warnings, Labeling Changes, or Withdrawals: Scoping Review

Abstract

Social media, along with conventional pharmacovigilance measures, can be used to detect signals associated with new black box warnings, labeling changes, or withdrawals. Several challenges remain; however, social media will be useful for signal detection of frequently mentioned drugs in specialized health care social networks and forums. Further studies are required to advance natural language processing and mine real-world data on social media.