Every day, millions of users reveal their interests on Facebook, which are then monetized via targeted advertisement marketing campaigns. In this paper, we explore the use of demographically rich Facebook Ads audience estimates for tracking non-communicable diseases around the world. Across 47 countries, we compute the audiences of marker interests, and evaluate their potential in tracking health conditions associated with tobacco use, obesity, and diabetes, compared to the performance of placebo interests. Despite its huge potential, we find that, for modeling prevalence of health conditions across countries, differences in these interest audiences are only weakly indicative of the corresponding prevalence rates. Within the countries, however, our approach provides interesting insights on trends of health awareness across demographic groups. Finally, we provide a temporal error analysis to expose the potential pitfalls of using Facebook's Marketing API as a black box.
The Facebook advertising API has been studied in terms of determining a relative value of different user demographics and assessing the overall stability of the advertising market @cite_16 @cite_12 . A few studies have attempted to link Facebook audience data to behavioral aspects and interests related to health conditions. Gittelman convert 37 Facebook interest categories to nine factors to use in the modeling of life expectancy @cite_6 . Although they show an improvement in the statistical models, their approach avoided determining relationships between each individual category with the real-world data. On the other hand, Chunara explore the relationship of two factors -- interest in television and outdoor activities -- to the obesity rates in metros across the USA and neighborhoods within New York City @cite_1 . Both of these studies are confined to the United States, and are limited to one health topic. In contrast, our study expands the set of real-world health indicators we track, as well as the geographic coverage to global proportions. Crucially, we assess the quality of Facebook data by introducing placebo baselines, normalization alternatives, and performing temporal analysis.
@cite_16 @cite_1 @cite_6 @cite_12
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Background: Investigation into personal health has become focused on conditions at an increasingly local level, while response rates have declined and complicated the process of collecting data at an individual level. Simultaneously, social media data have exploded in availability and have been shown to correlate with the prevalence of certain health conditions. Objective: Facebook likes may be a source of digital data that can complement traditional public health surveillance systems and provide data at a local level. We explored the use of Facebook likes as potential predictors of health outcomes and their behavioral determinants. Methods: We performed principal components and regression analyses to examine the predictive qualities of Facebook likes with regard to mortality, diseases, and lifestyle behaviors in 214 counties across the United States and 61 of 67 counties in Florida. These results were compared with those obtainable from a demographic model. Health data were obtained from both the 2010 and 2011 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and mortality data were obtained from the National Vital Statistics System. Results: Facebook likes added significant value in predicting most examined health outcomes and behaviors even when controlling for age, race, and socioeconomic status, with model fit improvements (adjusted R 2 ) of an average of 58 across models for 13 different health-related metrics over basic sociodemographic models. Small area data were not available in sufficient abundance to test the accuracy of the model in estimating health conditions in less populated markets, but initial analysis using data from Florida showed a strong model fit for obesity data (adjusted R 2 =.77). Conclusions: Facebook likes provide estimates for examined health outcomes and health behaviors that are comparable to those obtained from the BRFSS. Online sources may provide more reliable, timely, and cost-effective county-level data than that obtainable from traditional public health surveillance systems as well as serve as an adjunct to those systems. [J Med Internet Res 2015;17(4):e98] Background Understanding the social environmental around obesity has been limited by available data. One promising approach used to bridge similar gaps elsewhere is to use passively generated digital data. Purpose This article explores the relationship between online social environment via web-based social networks and population obesity prevalence. Methods We performed a cross-sectional study using linear regression and cross validation to measure the relationship and predictive performance of user interests on the online social network Facebook to obesity prevalence in metros across the United States of America (USA) and neighborhoods within New York City (NYC). The outcomes, proportion of obese and or overweight population in USA metros and NYC neighborhoods, were obtained via the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance and NYC EpiQuery systems. Predictors were geographically specific proportion of users with activity-related and sedentary-related interests on Facebook. Results Higher proportion of the population with activity-related interests on Facebook was associated with a significant 12.0 (95 Confidence Interval (CI) 11.9 to 12.1) lower predicted prevalence of obese and or overweight people across USA metros and 7.2 (95 CI: 6.8 to 7.7) across NYC neighborhoods. Conversely, greater proportion of the population with interest in television was associated with higher prevalence of obese and or overweight people of 3.9 (95 CI: 3.7 to 4.0) (USA) and 27.5 (95 CI: 27.1 to 27.9, significant) (NYC). For activity-interests and national obesity outcomes, the average root mean square prediction error from 10-fold cross validation was comparable to the average root mean square error of a model developed using the entire data set. Conclusions Activity-related interests across the USA and sedentary-related interests across NYC were significantly associated with obesity prevalence. Further research is needed to understand how the online social environment relates to health outcomes and how it can be used to identify or target interventions. We conduct a detailed investigation of correlations between real-time expressions of individuals made across the United States and a wide range of emotional, geographic, demographic, and health characteristics. We do so by combining (1) a massive, geo-tagged data set comprising over 80 million words generated in 2011 on the social network service Twitter and (2) annually-surveyed characteristics of all 50 states and close to 400 urban populations. Among many results, we generate taxonomies of states and cities based on their similarities in word use; estimate the happiness levels of states and cities; correlate highly-resolved demographic characteristics with happiness levels; and connect word choice and message length with urban characteristics such as education levels and obesity rates. Our results show how social media may potentially be used to estimate real-time levels and changes in population-scale measures such as obesity rates. Analyzing user messages in social media can measure different population characteristics, including public health measures. For example, recent work has correlated Twitter messages with influenza rates in the United States; but this has largely been the extent of mining Twitter for public health. In this work, we consider a broader range of public health applications for Twitter. We apply the recently introduced Ailment Topic Aspect Model to over one and a half million health related tweets and discover mentions of over a dozen ailments, including allergies, obesity and insomnia. We introduce extensions to incorporate prior knowledge into this model and apply it to several tasks: tracking illnesses over times (syndromic surveillance), measuring behavioral risk factors, localizing illnesses by geographic region, and analyzing symptoms and medication usage. We show quantitative correlations with public health data and qualitative evaluations of model output. Our results suggest that Twitter has broad applicability for public health research.